

Show HN: My side project - SnapRobot - daverecycles
http://www.snaprobot.com/news.ycombinator.com

======
daverecycles
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.

------
Ogre
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!

------
johnrob
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.

~~~
daverecycles
Right now they're actually just numbered in sequence (1, 2, 3). I have been
playing around with it. Sorry for the confusion, I'll work on it!

------
kapitalx
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.

~~~
daverecycles
Thanks. Definitely that is a very important improvement to make.

------
_grrr
Nice. Something's up with www.google.com though
[http://www.snaprobot.com/www.google.com?&sl=0&d=1](http://www.snaprobot.com/www.google.com?&sl=0&d=1)

~~~
daverecycles
Yeah, I know... sorry.

The app passes an extra parameter for cache busting and Google doesn't like
it. It will be fixed in an update.

------
9oliYQjP
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).

------
ssing
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.

~~~
daverecycles
Thanks. Will look into making it easier to share - perhaps permalink short
URLs?

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

~~~
daverecycles
Thanks!

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

~~~
zalew
f.ex. like this

python webkit2png.py -x -o hn.png <http://news.ycombinator.com/>

<http://www.alexezell.com/code/webkit2png.txt>

~~~
uggedal
More up to date version of webkit2png: <https://github.com/AdamN/python-
webkit2png>

There's also an OS X version available:
<https://github.com/paulhammond/webkit2png/>

