Show HN: My side project - SnapRobot

I find myself taking screenshots of websites all the time. Pages that I find visually interesting, because I've had far too many experiences where I went back and it looks like a completely different website. Or sometimes to remember information that is shown on a website for only a short period of time, like holiday layouts and fun coming soon pages. And I even take screenshots of my own webpages so I can look back at it later.

I know there's archive.org, but they take too long to archive content when all I want is a screenshot of the recent past of a webpage.

So I created SnapRobot as a side project. It was built in less than a day.

You feed it a URL and leave it. SnapRobot monitors the page, taking screenshots whenever changes occur. You can come back whenever you want and relive pages of the past. :)

In the example, you can see how the top Hacker News items evolve over the course of a day.

Currently, any HTML change triggers a new screenshot so it works better for websites that don't dynamically generate different code on every request. No query strings for now.

I am disappointed that entering http://snaprobot.com only gives an error page. I was hoping for an infinitely recursive snapshot.

Edit: tried it again, and I DID get a snapshot of snaprobot displaying the BBC site, which is its default page. I guess the error was an actual error (it was an indexing disallowed error). Kudos!

I assumed the large numbers were dates, when they are actually times (13 = 1 pm, not the 13th). I'd either use 'am/pm' or add ':00' to each time to make this more apparent. Large numbers inside boxes is a similar pattern to calendars, which is why this can be confusing.

Looks neat. You might need a threshold in changes made. Seems like most websites have small irrelevant things that change on every visit. Like number of comments on techcrunch, or a timestamp in the code, resulting in a screenshot on every try.

Nice. Something's up with www.google.com though http://www.snaprobot.com/www.google.com?&sl=0&d=1

This would be incredibly useful for publicly traded corps to help prove that they made information public at a specific time (i.e., disclosure requirements were met).

Pretty neat and useful. May be you have already thought about it but I felt the need to forward/share that screen shot with my friends.

This is pretty cool. Very well laid out and aesthetically pleasing for a 1 day project. Congrats!

That is pretty neat. Would it be giving it away if I asked how you generated the screenshots?