4 ms·

Show HN: DailyScreenshot - track the visual evolution of any website

9 points by lamby 15y ago

I was already doing this semi-manually for a handful a websites of my own and then I thought "Hey, other people might want to do this too". Tracking the Google homepage and BBC News can be pretty fun too. Got my first paid customer on the weekend, which felt good. :) Anyway, here's the site: http://dailyscreenshot.com/ Thoughts, comments, feedback?

lamby 15y ago
Clickable: http://dailyscreenshot.com/ http://dailyscreenshot.com/
metachris 15y ago
Great idea. I hope you are comparing the images to see if it has changed, and only save each changed site once. Besides reducing the amount of data to store it will also be more usable for the users.
reemrevnivek 15y ago
Congrats on your launch! First things first: I'd like to see some examples of tracked sites: The BBC News one would be a good example. A thought: The aliasing on the free plan is annoying. PNG has multiple quality levels. Defaulting to JPEG for the free plan hurts both you (in terms of storage size) and your users, probably more than necessary. Use high compression on the free plan, and minimal compression on the paid ones. Feedback: I'm not sure whether I can or can not share the URLs of my channels without compromising my account. A "Publish" mechanism to generate a public URL for a date range would be great. Also, the calendar interface is unexpected, I think I'd rather have a slideshow.
- lamby 15y ago
  > Defaulting to JPEG for the free plan hurts both you (in terms of storage size) and your users Just to clarify - the JPEG filesizes are much smaller than the PNG versions, how is that hurting me with storage? Thank you for your feedback :)
p0larboy 15y ago
If you dun mind me asking, what tech did you use to capture the screenshot? I need to screenshot webpage for my client programmatically and I'm kinda lost
- sunspeck 15y ago
  This .js option was recently posted on HN and is not without errors, but is an interesting solution: http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ There are other ways to go about this, though.
- lamby 15y ago
  I am using webkit.
eminkel 15y ago
I think the idea is great, would it benefit you to allow a general query of screenshots over X days on say Google to see how the product works, rather than having to force a sign up?

9 points by lamby 15y ago

lamby 15y ago

Clickable: http://dailyscreenshot.com/ http://dailyscreenshot.com/

metachris 15y ago

Great idea. I hope you are comparing the images to see if it has changed, and only save each changed site once. Besides reducing the amount of data to store it will also be more usable for the users.

reemrevnivek 15y ago

Congrats on your launch! First things first: I'd like to see some examples of tracked sites: The BBC News one would be a good example. A thought: The aliasing on the free plan is annoying. PNG has multiple quality levels. Defaulting to JPEG for the free plan hurts both you (in terms of storage size) and your users, probably more than necessary. Use high compression on the free plan, and minimal compression on the paid ones. Feedback: I'm not sure whether I can or can not share the URLs of my channels without compromising my account. A "Publish" mechanism to generate a public URL for a date range would be great. Also, the calendar interface is unexpected, I think I'd rather have a slideshow.

lamby 15y ago
> Defaulting to JPEG for the free plan hurts both you (in terms of storage size) and your users Just to clarify - the JPEG filesizes are much smaller than the PNG versions, how is that hurting me with storage? Thank you for your feedback :)

p0larboy 15y ago

If you dun mind me asking, what tech did you use to capture the screenshot? I need to screenshot webpage for my client programmatically and I'm kinda lost

sunspeck 15y ago
This .js option was recently posted on HN and is not without errors, but is an interesting solution: http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ There are other ways to go about this, though.
lamby 15y ago
I am using webkit.

eminkel 15y ago

I think the idea is great, would it benefit you to allow a general query of screenshots over X days on say Google to see how the product works, rather than having to force a sign up?