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Incidentally over the last few weeks I've been looking around the tools to monitor the appearance of websites; think of this as a step up from "is my site still

Incidentally over the last few weeks I've been looking around the tools to monitor the appearance of websites; think of this as a step up from "is my site still online?" services, over toward "does my stride still look roughly correct". The latter is super important for sites whose functioning is critical to (for example) business happening, cash flowing, salaries being paid. What I found is that this market is relatively crowded at the low end, with services that either don't state what browser they are using to render a site for a visual check, or which state and only support one browser. It looks like screen.rip is also aiming at this low-end. I don't see anything on there about what browser uses, and nothing about choosing a browser. And it is only $7 (for 10000 images). It seems to me that there may also be a market for people happy to pay $70 for the same thing, with the ability to specify which browser, and have the list of available browsers include the ones that are kind of inconvenient to support (older IE). Sure, it's a lot more of a technical slog, but I imagine someone facing the sort of troubles and trying to monitor the appearance of their site across all the major browsers would find that 10 X the stated price is a relatively good deal compared to the misery of setting all that up locally.

thecodemonkey 9y ago
I’ve been having the same sort of frustrations and needs for a while, and recently launch something to scratch that itch [1] It’s tangently similar to screen.rip, but it’s much more focused on getting up and started quickly and making it easy to monitor sides that require authentication. Let me know what you think. [1] https://pixelbug.io https://pixelbug.io
- scotchio 9y ago
  I've been using this for about month and like the email notifications when changes happen. Pretty nice to have in my inbox for what I do. Disclosure: I know the creator.
  - dabernathy89 9y ago
    I was going to mention Pixelbug in the comments as a possible alternative. Disclosure: I know the parent commenter. And the creator. :)
yesbabyyes 9y ago
No affiliation, but I have used Browserling by pkrumins and substack, albeit never for screenshots. https://www.browserling.com/ https://www.browserling.com/
chrisweekly 9y ago
But WebPageTest is free (and setting up a private instance isn’t hard).
JustARandomGuy 9y ago
>It seems to me that there may also be a market for people happy to pay $70 for the same thing, with the ability to specify which browser, and have the list of available browsers include the ones that are kind of inconvenient to support (older IE). Mark me down on this list. In particular, I'd like an API that lets me have a more detailed look into the web page - for example, list all images used by the web page (this is a lot harder than it sounds once you consider images can be loaded by CSS, IMG HTML tag, can be delayed loading, etc). In short, I'd love an API where I can see the same details of a webpage as Chrome's debugger shows. I looked into Chrome headless, but there was some issue with hooking into the debugger (admittedly I know only the basics about Chrome headless).

thecodemonkey 9y ago

I’ve been having the same sort of frustrations and needs for a while, and recently launch something to scratch that itch [1] It’s tangently similar to screen.rip, but it’s much more focused on getting up and started quickly and making it easy to monitor sides that require authentication. Let me know what you think. [1] https://pixelbug.io https://pixelbug.io

scotchio 9y ago
I've been using this for about month and like the email notifications when changes happen. Pretty nice to have in my inbox for what I do. Disclosure: I know the creator.
- dabernathy89 9y ago
  I was going to mention Pixelbug in the comments as a possible alternative. Disclosure: I know the parent commenter. And the creator. :)

yesbabyyes 9y ago

No affiliation, but I have used Browserling by pkrumins and substack, albeit never for screenshots. https://www.browserling.com/ https://www.browserling.com/

chrisweekly 9y ago

But WebPageTest is free (and setting up a private instance isn’t hard).

JustARandomGuy 9y ago

>It seems to me that there may also be a market for people happy to pay $70 for the same thing, with the ability to specify which browser, and have the list of available browsers include the ones that are kind of inconvenient to support (older IE). Mark me down on this list. In particular, I'd like an API that lets me have a more detailed look into the web page - for example, list all images used by the web page (this is a lot harder than it sounds once you consider images can be loaded by CSS, IMG HTML tag, can be delayed loading, etc). In short, I'd love an API where I can see the same details of a webpage as Chrome's debugger shows. I looked into Chrome headless, but there was some issue with hooking into the debugger (admittedly I know only the basics about Chrome headless).