Show HN: A simple full page website snapshot service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A simple full page website snapshot service

snapito.com

21 pointshashbo44 comments

OK, great effort getting this up and running but the font rendering is, well, not good. For comparison: http://no.gd/p/snapito-20120217-043956.jpg

I set out to tackle this problem a few years ago and while it was easy to rig up stuff to do this in Linux, getting anywhere near the rendering quality that I saw in OS X was impossible. It seems it may still be :-)

It was a couple of years ago now and I asked on Twitter if anyone would pay for an OS X powered Web page screenshot service and had a lot of response but.. busy with other things. Would love to see one though as it seems to be the only OS to render pages with any finesse.

Agreed on the rendering being off a bit.

That would be another cool feature for this - to pick your browser/OS to point out browser specifics bugs. There's already http://netrenderer.com/ for IE - but it doesn't let you do anything with the image.

That's obviously a very limited focus for a great general use app, but an idea.

Yeah I think it’s the ‘with finesse part’ that is worth pursuing for sure.

In the hopes of finding out the rendering engine Snapito used, I tried http://snapito.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhatsmyuseragent.com%2F ; however, that seems to hang forever. I would chalk that up to heavy load from HN, except that other pages seem to work just fine.

This works:

http://snapito.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhatsmyua.com%2F&x=...

Seems to be using webkit.

http://snapito.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsupportdetails.com%2F&#...

:-) I use wkhtmltoimage but I’m considering a move over to PhantomJS it’s a known bug that if a page contains a missing resource which 404s then the whole thing 404s. Hence why I’m considering PhantomJS as it’s at least a lot easy to program error detection etc.

http://snapito.com/?url=http://www.useragentstring.com/

I typed in "example.org", and got back "Please enter a URL". For convenience, consider automatically assuming "http:// in the front if the user doesn't specify a URL scheme. (Please do continue allowing URLs with http:// or https:// explicitly specified, though.) You shouldn't make that assumption if you provide an API in the future (API callers should specify full valid URLs), but it would make the current web interface more friendly.

Whatever renderer you used to render the page has absolutely no antialiasing in its font rendering, resulting in pixelated rendering.

Josh that’s really interesting, what browser were you using, because the app doesn’t say ‘Please enter a URL’ this must be a browser feature working against input type=‘url’. I’d love to know the browser you were using. It certainly shouldn’t require a http:// at the front.

Yeah you’re 100% right about the fonts, I definitely plan to sort that out ASAP.

Oh, interesting! I use Firefox 10, and I didn't realize that that validation came from the browser rather than your page.

Josh if you see it still let me know. I just hacked a quick JS fix and tested in FF10 and all seems to be well. But as you know each version of each browser has it’s own little features :-)

Seems to work now. Thanks!

The "Please enter a URL" prompt also happens in Chrome (version 16.0.912.77)

+1 for the anti-aliasing

Added, and extra fonts and colour depth fixed :-)

I like it. It's neat and fun to play with, but I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. I think a little "What you can use Snapito for" or "10 ways to use Snapito" link somewhere would be helpful. I can imagine it being useful for web designers who want to show designs to people, but how else do you envision people using it?

Also (this is just a minor nitpick), it'd be nice to not have to enter in http://. I'm using Chrome.

I like the concept. A lot.

It would be 100x more useful if you added a set of tools at the right that emulate Skitch, so you could mark up a screenshot and then merge the edits into a new image. I would probably stop using Skitch immediately.

Also - if you're going to use KISSinsights to ask your users questions, ask a meaningful question. The current question is pretty obnoxious. Just my $.02

Hey wow thanks for the feedback, appreciate that a lot. Hacker News folk just rock!

Interesting idea RE: skitch, certainly worth some consideration - I had considered annotations at least, and will take the idea very seriously.

RE: KISSinsights, I’m a bit of an amateur really so I just used the recommended free questions to get started with. But point taken :-)

What did you write this in?

Also, your site http://www.hashbo.com is down right now.

Yeah, sorry that was another past hack :-) that’s kinda moved over to it’s new experiment at http://boardcast.it

And the app was done in (the apparently uncool :-) Java - it was just a quick hack because I noticed that snapshot services were cluttered and complicated and most folk just want a simple full page image. Anyway it was written today out of some code used in http://boardcast.it.

Interesting that you'd switch from Skitch if it had that feature set. I can't imagine a scenario where I'd ever prefer to hit, from a page I'd like a screenshot of:

    > cmd+l, cmd+c, cmd+t, sna, <down-arrow>, enter, tab, cmd+v, enter, right click generated image, copy link

As opposed to (skitch keybinds):

    > cmd+shift+5, click once in my browser window, click once on share link

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes the web-based workflow more appealing to you as a user?

Making a snapito bookmarklet seems trivial. Here, have one:

  javascript:window.location=%22http://snapito.com/?url=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)

Given such a bookmarklet, the workflow becomes: click bookmarklet, click share link.

It's more the annotation/cropping feature set that would make it valuable. Currently to mark up a site, I need to go to that site, open skitch, take the snapshot, then edit it in skitch, then save. Then attach it to a gmail message and send (or upload to dropbox and send the link).

If there was a cloud solution that could do all of this, and provide a link that I could just send someone - it's just so much easier.

Not bad - definitely a solid start. This happens to be on my own idea list:

11. Full-page screenshot service that doesn't suck

I'm happy to be able to tick it off as completed by someone else. :)

Edit: I tried sending it a url with Typekit fonts on the page. No dice. I'm assuming that Javascript is turned off?

Javascript is on but this is running on headless Linux without TTF so there’s the rub, clearly the fonts are a big issue so I’m thinking about the whole elegant rendering aspect actually. I think the comments about rendering on OS X actually have some merit if the cost can be kept down.

I'd probably pay you a small monthly fee to automatically take screen shots of a few web pages so I could have an historical record.

I'm sure quite a few web developers, especially startup founders, wish they did a better job keeping track of iterations and design changes.

What a fabulous little idea Andy! Duly noted.

This is a cool hack! I think the next step is to think about what kind of problem this technology could solve. For example, I would use this tool if I could input a width and height to dynamically generate snapshots of websites at different screen resolutions.

Why thank you kind sir/lady.

So this came about because people keep asking me for what tool to use to full page snapshots. And while there are tools that do it on your local machine, most web tools are just focussed on integrating with other sites not the user experience. So I thought I’d give it a quick go - I’ll probably add the scaling stuff at some point, just want to keep it nice and easy for users at the mo.

Thanks for the feedback!

I think it's struggling to process my request... i entered in "http://snapito.com/?url=news.ycombinator.com&x=0&y=0 into the URL. Looping perhaps?

Yeah snapshotting itself is a big no-no :-) nice try ;-) LOL

One minor critique... the example placeholders are of the form "example.com" but it seems to reject domains that are not fully qualified (e.g. "http://example.com)

Neat idea though.

Thx. Really, without the http:// - darn - do you have an example, that would be awesome if you did. I just tried a few and they seem to work. But clearly there’s a bug somewhere so I’d love to squash it!

I think it's because you've specified the type attribute of the input box as URL. Certain newer browsers will force validation on that (latest chrome and ff both do).

Is this a toy project or are you guys planning to develop it further? There is a couple of really neat opportunities to turn this sort of service into a good business.

It’s a test of the water in regards to a more user focussed website snapshotting service. Rather than the usual aimed at integrating into third parties. In reality it was put together in a couple of hours as a POC - underneath the covers it uses the code from main project http://boardcast.it which is still pretty experimental.

Love to hear of any ideas/suggestions you have, feel free to drop me a line neil AT snapito.com if you like too. I’m all ears.

After the image is generated, I think you should put a download button as well as Facebook and Twitter buttons for sharing.

Good idea! Will do.

I would definitely pay for a reliable snapshot service with an API. 100%. Build this, take my money, please!

Like Browshot (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144066) ? :-)

Welcome to the neighborhood! See also url2png.com

I tried http://kittiesntitties.tumblr.com and my patience timed out. Maybe 60 seconds and still no image...

It knows your naughty thoughts and is busy thinking nice thoughts.

Or in fact the website has some missing artefacts which confuse Snapito! Consider that bug firmly raised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com