Show HN: Web site I built last night that takes screenshots of web sites | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Web site I built last night that takes screenshots of web sites

sitegazer.herokuapp.com

30 pointsderwiki47 comments

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!

Well of all the people that posted links to alternates yours was the only one that worked. Great app and nice execution.

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!

Great site and thanks for sharing. http://Site2Pic.com also mentioned in this thread works just fine.

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!

Resubmitting this, very nice. Submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617097

Many thanks!

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.

What's ur next steps with it? Charge? OpenSource?

Thanks! I built this as I was doing competitive analysis for my other project, www.cameralends.com. I have a few ideas for where to take this:

- 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?

$7 a month for all that above I'd pay.

API call - url=http://whatever.com reply - src=http://s3bucket of image bonus crop - auto crop image based on params (500x500)

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

https://browshot.com/api/documentation#screenshot_create ? Browshot supports upload to S3 and cropping (https://browshot.com/api/documentation#screenshot_thumbnail)

URL2PNG has a WordPress plugin to take screenshots sautomatically

Looks great - will try and test out as I REALLY need this service automated :)

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 ;-)

https://sitegazer.herokuapp.com/reports

Interesting to see what sites users have submitted!

EDIT: I can also delete from that page!

Removed delete/update/edit. Agree, it was fun and surprising to see URLs roll in!

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?

Have you considered using http://urlbox.io - Screenshot as a Service api?

Doesn't accept www.* links. Need to specifically feed it http://...

> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

> If you are the application owner check the logs for more information.

Refreshing the page once did away with this.

Page comes up, but then when I type in my URL, it crashes.

I created http://site2pic.com/ a couple years ago, it also hosts the screenshots. Not sure what to do with it.

Great. I tried it and it works just fine. I also like the fact that you provide a link to the image.

Suggestion: add a field to use a custom DNS server.

Then one could get different screenshots for the same URL (i.e. to use when testing or migrating websites).

This might be where there is value in the idea.

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.

I've built a tool that does more or less exactly this - give it a try, maybe even send some feedback - http://www.geopeeker.com

Updates are in progress that will let you do all sorts of tweaks to the agent, even the DOM.

...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.

[1] - https://github.com/juliangruber/review

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 for that extra API goodness you could do it through node and expose your fancy wide-screenshot-app to the world : https://github.com/alexscheelmeyer/node-phantom

browsershots.org lets you optionally chose the screen size, 1600px width is an option.

Browshot can do up to 1920px width.

Crashes..

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.

This reminded me of the Google Perceptual Diff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUAZt0PFMQk https://github.com/bslatkin/dpxdt

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

really good way to view a site you shouldn't be looking at

I wrote a super simple Ruby app to do this: https://github.com/ctide/screenshotter

Something similar is this blog post about using Selenium + Perl (and bit of GD) to create screenshots of all your website pages via its sitemap.

A contact sheet for your website - http://techblog.babyl.ca/entry/contact-sheet

Your app seems to be down at the moment.

Here is a similar project: https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash#renderpng

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.

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