Congrats on JFDI an idea - There is a ton of opportunity in this space as well as competitors. It's been something I have been struggling with as I want a cheap option that lets me take the screenshot (works with flash and lots of javascript) and lets me resize or crop and then place on s3.
Would pay $10/month for up to 300 images - $25/month for up to 3,000
2 biggest pains/wants for this
1) WordPress Blog that I could build a plugin (or u) so I can embed a screenshot for reviews
2) for apps I build that embed a link - pull a screenshot and auto embed so it looks pretty
Would love to be your first customer - lmk johnmurch.com
I was needing a service that took a screenshot of a site but at a wide width. Every service I found online took it at like 1000px or right at the cut off of the layout and I wanted it to show more. It's crazy in Chrome I can't seem to find a decent tool that takes a shot of the entire web page.
You could write something like this yourself in about 5 lines of code using PhantomJS: http://phantomjs.org/ Check out rasterize.js in their examples section.
...And then you posted it on HN and your site crashed. There is a really good tool that I found to capture screenshots of other websites on GitHub called Review[1]. I'll compare it to this thing once this comes back up.
no doubt you built it last night - some testing would have been nice before publishing - i tried to snap http://imolly.herokuapp.com and i got Amazon's error page
Sorry about that :( But why load test before I had to? It works well in a low-traffic setting, and I had no idea the HN gods would be so kind to me. But now that I have early feedback, I can make a better decision about how to proceed.
You should also check out http://www.htmltoimage.io
it does the same thing and more. BTW: your app looks great. Just let allow me to enter something like CNN.com without http
I built a similar tool called GeoPeeker (http://www.geopeeker.com) that does this as well, but does so from a number of different geographic locations. Handy for trouble-shooting DNS and CDN issues. I too submitted it to Hacker News but alas, it found no love. C'est la vie!
Thanks! You've no idea how much I appreciate the kind words. I've put a good deal of work into it, and have a number of new features currently under development.
Great job, but for the one thing I think it would be useful, it is not.
I built this website (www.portacomprimido.com.br or www.pillorganizer.co) in Portuguese and translated to english. It is supposed to check your browser's language and serve the proper language - portuguese for PT-BR, english for all others (doesn't matter which URL you use, both are the same website).
As I not very sure of my coding skills, I wanted to check it, so I asked a friend of mine living in the USA to check it for me. I thought your website would be a easier way to check it, but it is not. All locations show the english version, even the ones supposed to be from "Sâo Paulo, Brazil". If you can correct this, it would be a nice feature.
Thanks for the feedback Soneca. I'm currently working on a feature that will let you change your user agent and language to address this issue. This, and other new features will be hitting GeoPeeker in early November.
Very nice project. Here are some ideas for premium features:
-Change monitor. If images stop matching, issue an alert.
-More locations in general. Obvious additional server costs.
-Screenshots by user agent; iOS, Android, IE, Firefox, Chrome.
-Screenshots by other variables. Is a particular ISP injecting ads? etc.
Change monitor/alerts would be useful for detecting problems traditional monitor tools may miss. Additionally may be useful in contractual situations where another party is employing cloaking. E.g. I bought a static button banner and the seller is switching it out on me.
Premium features are being worked on as I type this. The one I'm most excited about will be the ability to schedule 'peeks' at a site. Load times, pings, email notifications and browser agent tweaks will be also be included. I'm also toying with providing html/js/css file diffs over time. So much to do!
Hey everyone, thanks for all the kind words and ideas. Currently, I'm hitting limits with SauceLabs and don't have any more time right now to work on this (work day). I've already done some low hanging scaling work (Unicorn, scaling workers, upgrading databases), but the site is under too high of load to work normally. Sorry about that! I really didn't expect this much traffic from Hacker News, and I assure you it's delightful when no one else is using it ;-)
Before SearchMe was shut down and had its assets liquidated, I built the tool that took all of the screenshots for the search results. (SeRPs were presented as a series of screenshots rather than a list of links; see http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/searchme-launches-new-searc... for some examples.) The toughest thing to get right was consistent screenshots of Java and Flash content.
I can't get your app to load, but does it handle at least those two plugins? If so, how? And if not, do you plan to change that?
48 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 56.9 ms ] threadWhat's ur next steps with it? Charge? OpenSource?
- take a timelapse of your site, one screenshot per day
- create a report of 10-20 webpage screenshots (one time for competitive analysis, scheduled & emailed for visual QA)
- options to use different browsers
Because I'm using SauceLabs and S3, I have hosting costs, so I am definitely interested in some sort of paid premium version. What would you pay for?
Would pay $10/month for up to 300 images - $25/month for up to 3,000
2 biggest pains/wants for this 1) WordPress Blog that I could build a plugin (or u) so I can embed a screenshot for reviews 2) for apps I build that embed a link - pull a screenshot and auto embed so it looks pretty
Would love to be your first customer - lmk johnmurch.com
URL2PNG has a WordPress plugin to take screenshots sautomatically
Interesting to see what sites users have submitted!
EDIT: I can also delete from that page!
This could be a great product in advertising if you can a) simulate traffic / browser from another location
Take repeated screenshots throughout the day.
Advertisers love to know where their ads have been running and this is a really easy problem that has not been well solved yet.
> If you are the application owner check the logs for more information.
[1] - https://github.com/juliangruber/review
Then one could get different screenshots for the same URL (i.e. to use when testing or migrating websites).
You could also add different User Agent Strings, different Request IPs etc... to simulate different users in different parts of the world.
Otherwise it seems some open source script could do this very easily and free.
Updates are in progress that will let you do all sorts of tweaks to the agent, even the DOM.
I built this website (www.portacomprimido.com.br or www.pillorganizer.co) in Portuguese and translated to english. It is supposed to check your browser's language and serve the proper language - portuguese for PT-BR, english for all others (doesn't matter which URL you use, both are the same website).
As I not very sure of my coding skills, I wanted to check it, so I asked a friend of mine living in the USA to check it for me. I thought your website would be a easier way to check it, but it is not. All locations show the english version, even the ones supposed to be from "Sâo Paulo, Brazil". If you can correct this, it would be a nice feature.
-Change monitor. If images stop matching, issue an alert.
-More locations in general. Obvious additional server costs.
-Screenshots by user agent; iOS, Android, IE, Firefox, Chrome.
-Screenshots by other variables. Is a particular ISP injecting ads? etc.
Change monitor/alerts would be useful for detecting problems traditional monitor tools may miss. Additionally may be useful in contractual situations where another party is employing cloaking. E.g. I bought a static button banner and the seller is switching it out on me.
I can't get your app to load, but does it handle at least those two plugins? If so, how? And if not, do you plan to change that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUAZt0PFMQk https://github.com/bslatkin/dpxdt
A contact sheet for your website - http://techblog.babyl.ca/entry/contact-sheet