
Convert Any Webpage to an Image - foxhop
http://linkpeek.com/website-thumbnail-generator
======
thehodge
It's been 6 hours since this was posted and there are still NSFW images on the
homepage, one of your differentiators is 'customer support' this really needs
to be sorted ASAP.

Even if it's just a static image while you work on moderation, I'd rather not
see a disembodied head at 8am whilst eating my frosties..

~~~
tintin
7 hours ago foxhop just said: "Yeah, sorry about that."

Well sorry about never using your website again. I've just seen things I never
want to see again.

Tip: Never launch a site after a day of work. Always launch it when you start
your work day. There will always be some problems you like to fix immediately.

~~~
foxhop
Yeah, huge mistake. Sorry.

------
a3camero
When I went to this site it showed a thumbnail for YouPorn on the right. Maybe
not a good idea to show the most recent thumbnails generated!

Useful service though. I had a need for this a year or so ago.

~~~
foxhop
Yeah, sorry about that. I hope nobody gets flagged for NSFW.

I'll have to rethink the recent image on the right.

If you don't mind me asking, what did you need this service for a year ago?
I'm still trying to fit the proper market.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

~~~
tamersalama
Or crowdsource image reviews

~~~
jarin
I really don't think all that trouble is necessary. A particular user is
probably only going to see the homepage once or twice before creating an
account, so even just hand-picking 5 images and rotating between them with
JavaScript is probably plenty.

------
heathkit
Yeah I got tubgirl.

Welcome to the internet, guys. If you have a public place that displays user
generated content, it's going to be flooded with the most vile images around.

Since we've already had goatse and tubgirl, I'm guessing the next is lemon
party.

~~~
jarin
Before reading the comments, I clicked on the link and saw meatspin. I'm glad
I work at home, so I can laugh about it instead of being embarrassed.

~~~
navs
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.

------
callmeed
I currently use url2png but I could be convinced to switch (and pay).

My biggest need (which no one seems to provide) is support for rendering
@font-face web fonts (I use Google's).

If you could get this working, I'd definitely pay for it.

~~~
waleedka
I built <http://www.bitpixels.com> a while ago, when I needed to generate
thumbnail images and the available options were too expensive. It's available
for free and serves a few million thumbnails a month.

I didn't add a lot of advanced features (it's a side project), but it's stable
and gets the job done.

------
citricsquid
What makes it better than the alternatives, or (as this is MVP) what is your
_plan_ to make it different/better? A company I use (<http://xbrow.se/>) is
relatively feature complete and offers a wide variety of different browser
choices, do you plan something similar?

~~~
foxhop
We have huge plans for linkpeek. First step is getting the word out.

I hope to give better support then the other alternatives. I've used a few and
found that there was a hole in the market for this type of service.

We want to have a killer api and become integrated into web applications. I
want to bring google "instant preview" to anyone who wants it.

------
mahmud
minor nitpick: there is a naked fat man covered in poop on your front page.

------
foxhop
<http://linkpeek.com/screenshot-news-and-updates>

LinkPeek.com Apology

Mon Dec 5 16:59:32 EST 2011

I am truly sorry for the grotesque and disgusting imagery posted on our site
this morning.

I left the "most recent" image on the website even though multiple people
warned me about the possible misuse. I blame only myself.

I lost my lunch today. My nerves are all messed up. I have worked on the
LinkPeek software for the past 6 months.

The thought that LinkPeek was used as a weapon against my peers makes me sick.

I feel exploited, I feel embarrassed, I feel ashamed and I have only myself to
blame. This is a nightmare and I have no way to fix it.

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life; Today is the worse day of my
life.

I don't expect many will read this, but truly I am sorry.

    
    
            -Russell

~~~
mahmud
Naah, wasn't that big of a deal. If anything, it was a security lesson for all
of us, albeit a very vivid one.

------
blhack
Hi, foxhop.

So there is another service that does this called <http://pagepeeker.com> \--
in what ways are you better and/or different?

Why should I use linkpeek instead?

(And are you worried about using a similar name to them?)

------
abcd_f
Hash-banged pages are not properly supported, e.g.
<http://twitter.com/#!/username>. It is easy to add - have a look at
_escaped_fragment notation.

~~~
foxhop
Thank you for the heads up. We will put some research into hash bang uri
support.

------
minhajuddin
I just extracted part of our code to create an open source sinatra app which
does the same, you can check it out <http://wti.heroku.com/>

Oh, check out the screenshot of this very HN thread
[http://wti.heroku.com/convert?site_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.yco...](http://wti.heroku.com/convert?site_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D3312710)
. How meta is that :)

------
barmstrong
ShrinkTheWeb.com has been around a while and (I think) made a decent small
business out of this. However, their site is horrific and it's pretty
expensive.

A more recent alternative I've used is url2png.com which has been great.

edit: sorry, not thumbalizr, meant url2png

~~~
foxhop
ShrinkTheWeb was our inspiration for building LinkPeek.com

We would like to correct all the things they do wrong.

~~~
code_duck
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.

------
foxhop
This is my startup MVP software. Please test it out and let me know what you
think.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Seems fast and does a good job, but doesn't appear to support https sites?

~~~
foxhop
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.

------
greggman
"Convert Any Webpage to an Image"

Yea, if you mean broken image.

Try any WebGL page (nothing) or any Canvas2D game (loading...) or any page
that used 3D CSS (blank)

Links tried:
[http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_lines_color...](http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_lines_colors.html)
[http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/canvas_materials_...](http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/canvas_materials_reflection.html)
<http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide41>

------
DanielRibeiro
Recursive linkpeek:
[http://linkpeek.com/m/vault/21/254/2989ffe0-afa2-427c-aa0e-a...](http://linkpeek.com/m/vault/21/254/2989ffe0-afa2-427c-aa0e-a6c370fcfcb4.png)

------
jot
Have needed a service like this a few times. Current favorite solution is:
<http://url2png.com/> How do you differentiate LinkPeek?

~~~
foxhop
Linkpeek.com differentiates competition on api speed, customer support, and
flexibility.

We plan to price ourselves in reach for both small site (dynamic web designer
portfolios) and large link directories link HN. Also a more flexible billing
schedule.

Eventually we would like to add features that only our service provides.

------
rezaman
Nicely done. I released something similar a month ago:
<http://instantscreenshot.com>

Do you plan on charging for this at some point? I've noticed my bandwidth
costs are double due to the traffic coming to my site and the traffic my site
generates to get the screenshot.

~~~
mnutt
Along the same lines, url2png has a really nice API: <http://url2png.com/>

------
j45
If you don't mind me asking, which stack did you build this in?

I built something identical in about to do the actual HTML --> image
conversion. Took <40 LOC iirc to go from url to image.

Always curious to see how many different ways the same problem can be solved.
:)

~~~
code_duck
I created something to do this using VNC and Firefox a few years back. At the
time, people suggesting using webkit to do a simulated render (which I suppose
is what you did) but we required Adobe Flash. So, I created a rotator which
could create up to 20 VNC screens on demand, start firefox, and create an
image using vncsnapshot.

~~~
j45
Neat, vncsnapshot would be a cool way to get output out of multiple browsers
too. :)

------
sumukh1
There might already be services like this, but I'd love something that quickly
that will let me see how my page renders in IE 6+7/8 and also runs validation
and speed tests. (quickly is the key word)

------
windcbf
I was also trying to develop such service but ended up working on something
else.

I would sell my domain name ( html2image.com ) to anyone who can make better
use of it.

~~~
url2png
Drop me an email.

------
Johngibb
I think you can use input type="URL" instead of text to prevent mobile browser
autocomplete.

------
humbyvaldes
I noticed YouTube videos don't work... webs fonts work so that's good

------
rbrcurtis
what does your tech stack look like? how are you generating images?

~~~
zalew
I guess webkit2png

[http://www.blogs.uni-
osnabrueck.de/rotapken/2008/12/03/creat...](http://www.blogs.uni-
osnabrueck.de/rotapken/2008/12/03/create-screenshots-of-a-web-page-using-
python-and-qtwebkit/)

------
resnamen
This looks expensive. How well does this scale?

~~~
foxhop
LinkPeek.com == web scale

It could get expensive but we did hours of research when developing this
solution so that it will scale and keep costs down.

~~~
bigiain
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".)

~~~
foxhop
I agree, I was sort of mocking the term 'web scale' as a joke. At this point
we wouldn't be able to scale automatically but with some reasonable metrics we
could plan capacity accordingly.

------
duck
How are you planning on pricing this service?

------
grusk
Oh thanks OP. Goatse on the right. Lovely.

~~~
foxhop
Sorry, our users are posting NSFW images.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

------
paraschopra
We generate our own using PhantomJS

------
ljfoy
Sorry - why is this news again?

------
simplycomplex
Please mark it as NSFW :)

------
jarsj
eeeeks. I am not even sure I wanna comment on what I saw.

------
derleth
There are both Firefox and Chromium extensions to do this. What does this
service do that they do not?

~~~
code_duck
This sort of service can be automated more easily.

