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Here's something I've wished I'd had over the 20 years of web development efforts I've been involved in: for production sites, a site that crawls a path regular
by jvagner 9y ago
Here's something I've wished I'd had over the 20 years of web development efforts I've been involved in: for production sites, a site that crawls a path regularly and saves a copy of the site in a timeline fashion.
How many times I've thought, "Man, we've made a lot of changes in the last 9 months and no one has a visual narrative of all of those changes..."
- dewski 9y agoI built exactly this once, was fun to set and forget and look back on it in a few months. It calculated the diff and you could see obvious spikes when big changes were rolled out. You saw a lot of big spikes on say Apple.com when new products were announced or marketed, whereas Reddit.com was always changing and couldn't detect any meaningful patterns. It also had ffmpeg in the backend that would create a timelapse for you on demand. I built it when we rolled out our some rebranding/homepage changes on GitHub.com and nobody really knew off the top of our heads when exactly the last time we updated it was. Git only tracked code changes, no visual changes. It was originally built on top of http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
- hobofan 9y agoI'm currently building something that goes somewhat in that direction. Shoot me a mail, and I'll get back to you :)
- wingerlang 9y agoI implemented an auto-screenshotter for my app that takes a screenshot every time the app launches after a few seconds. It works really well to give a visual progression of the apps style and features. I'm at 3k screenshots over 1.5 years of development. The idea is to make a timeline when the app is done. I liked it so much I will add it into each app I work on from now on.