

Show HN: Web site I built last night that takes screenshots of web sites - derwiki
https://sitegazer.herokuapp.com/

======
lewsid
I built a similar tool called GeoPeeker
([http://www.geopeeker.com](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!

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

~~~
lewsid
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.

~~~
soneca
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.

~~~
lewsid
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.

------
johnmurch
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?

~~~
derwiki
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?

~~~
johnmurch
API call - url=[http://whatever.com](http://whatever.com) reply -
src=[http://s3bucket](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

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

URL2PNG has a WordPress plugin to take screenshots sautomatically

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

------
derwiki
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 ;-)

------
scotthtaylor
[https://sitegazer.herokuapp.com/reports](https://sitegazer.herokuapp.com/reports)

Interesting to see what sites users have submitted!

EDIT: I can also delete from that page!

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

------
cfinke
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/searchme-launches-new-search-
engine-with-heavy-backing-from-sequoia/) 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?

------
agurha
Have you considered using [http://urlbox.io](http://urlbox.io) \- Screenshot
as a Service api?

------
nikunjk
Doesn't accept www. __* links. Need to specifically feed
it[http://..](http://..).

------
twodayslate
> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

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

~~~
cheshireoctopus
Refreshing the page once did away with this.

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

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

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

------
crunchcaptain
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).

~~~
teleclimber
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.

~~~
lewsid
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](http://www.geopeeker.com)

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

------
joeblau
...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](https://github.com/juliangruber/review)

------
joshmlewis
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.

~~~
mayank
You could write something like this yourself in about 5 lines of code using
PhantomJS: [http://phantomjs.org/](http://phantomjs.org/) Check out
rasterize.js in their examples section.

~~~
alexscheelmeyer
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](https://github.com/alexscheelmeyer/node-phantom)

------
azifali
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.

------
qthrul
This reminded me of the Google Perceptual Diff

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

------
kimura
You should also check out
[http://www.htmltoimage.io](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

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

------
ctide
I wrote a super simple Ruby app to do this:
[https://github.com/ctide/screenshotter](https://github.com/ctide/screenshotter)

------
draegtun
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](http://techblog.babyl.ca/entry/contact-sheet)

------
mayank
Your app seems to be down at the moment.

------
darkrho
Here is a similar project:
[https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash#renderpng](https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash#renderpng)

------
xmus
no doubt you built it last night - some testing would have been nice before
publishing - i tried to snap
[http://imolly.herokuapp.com](http://imolly.herokuapp.com) and i got Amazon's
error page

~~~
derwiki
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.

