Convert Any Webpage to an Image

Yeah, huge mistake. Sorry.

You don't need the most up to date 'recent images'. Toss them in a folder for manual review, and check a couple once an hour, or even less frequently.

I thought at first it was some sort of service for porn sites! Porn companies need service providers too...

I think it was for one of my clients that has a directory service for green service providers in Ontario (http://www.greatgreendirectory.ca/Group/Windfall-Ecology-Cen...). For any sort of directory it would be useful to show the website linked to.

I actually built a service like this for internal use a couple of years ago.

I worked at an agency, we were responsible for the web sites of companies of which many were listed at various exchanges. This included handling the publication of press releases. The exchange rules are pretty strict, if a press release is leaked early, you are in a world of hurt. If you publish it too late, you are in a world of hurt. The fines could be draconian in nature.

This led to inane publication work flows, where literally nothing would be allowed to touch anything that could somehow be connected to the internet. The press releases are handed to us in encrypted form. The publication is prepared one day in advance, and at 5am a couple of poor souls have to show up at the office and publish them before the exchange opens, they also have to trigger newsletters. They also had to take print screens of every change they made and file them in a folder.

Because our clients could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for mistakes, among other things, I created an automated screen shot service that regularly takes screen shots of certain areas on the client web pages and also downloads the associated html source. External guys audited the application. This is basically just a precaution so that no client can claim we somehow accidentally leaked unwanted information. It's also there to prove that we managed to publish everything in time.

Now of course, once you have something like this in place, someone has to monitor it to make sure it works all the time :) lol...

You could run through the sites you grab the thumbnails from and take an educated guess if they should be shown or not.

Most adult sites have an rta meta tag. You can use that along with Alexa and scraping the keywords + domain name for usual suspect text fragments. Might help block out those horrific images that cant be unseen..

Otherwise, love this service and I'm pretty sure I'll be using it

I've created my own service like this. The goal was to provide an archive of images for clients, showing their website's content over time and 'proof' of this or that. The setup involved a system to create VNC/xvfb screens, which ran a real browser and created a snapshot further processed with imagemagick. This required a bit of a larger VPS than I would have needed otherwise. There was some overhead and complexity. I researched the systems available at the time, and most of them were either too expensive or inadequate (i.e. only provided thumbnails, and we needed full size snaps).

It only pulls from your own history, so maybe you need to be careful about what you are browsing!

       /JK

I got the same. Pretty much hit the back button before I even had a chance to check the site out.

I saw a picture of an alien and an old man being a lil too friendly. I wish I could laugh but I fear this will haunt me for the rest of the night.

I've decided I'll now read comments first.

I think the first step is correcting the things you're doing wrong, such as not removing the potential for your site to be showing photos of graphic anal sex on the front page. I'm a bit surprised you didn't 1> foresee the potential for abuse or inappropriate images and 2> fix it immediately as soon as it was brought to your attention.

Being on the front page of HN is a grand thing. Unfortunately you may be not only squandering this chance for positive results, but bringing yourself negative publicity.

You are right, I just noticed that too.

After the traffic slows I'll add https support thanks for the heads up! 104 concurrent users right now.

Neat, vncsnapshot would be a cool way to get output out of multiple browsers too. :)

Not wanting to be _too_ snarky, but I hardly think "hours of research" translates to "web scale".

Do you _honestly_ think you could keep this up if, say, someone wrote a Wordpress plugin that automatically linked all your eBay sales screenshots into your blog, and Wordpress then installed it on their hosted service?

(Maybe I'm using the term "web scale" wrong, but in my head "web scale" means "the sort of problems Google, Facebook, and maybe Yahoo mostly get right, and almost everybody else mostly gets wrong". And the failure to predict the _first_ thing people would do is point it at goatse is a prime example of "getting it wrong".)

Heh, and this is surprising why? :-)

It's a nice concept, but isn't it what Silk and OperaMini do? Sort of a pre-render the page and then send that to you? Clearly folks could pull previews off the Google page preview function as well. So I'm wondering at long term utility or a use case.