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Convert Any Webpage to an Image
- j45 15y agoIf 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 15y agoI 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 15y agoNeat, vncsnapshot would be a cool way to get output out of multiple browsers too. :)
- foxhop 15y agoThis is my startup MVP software. Please test it out and let me know what you think.
- Turing_Machine 15y agoSeems fast and does a good job, but doesn't appear to support https sites?
- foxhop 15y agoYou 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.
- myared 15y agoGreat concept, but people are taking advantage of the fact that you're showing the latest screen shot on the right hand side of the page. It's pretty grotesque. You may want to fix that.
- abcd_f 15y agoDo you have 1:1 screenshots available? Being able to generate a website screenshot for specific OS/browser on demand might be a far better niche than trying to compete in a thumbnail segment (even if you will deliver a better service, there's a SEO battle to consider - make sure you know how to win it).
- citricsquid 15y agoWhat 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/ http://xbrow.se/) is relatively feature complete and offers a wide variety of different browser choices, do you plan something similar?
- foxhop 15y agoWe 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.
- a3camero 15y agoWhen 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 15y agoYeah, 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 15y agoYou 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 15y agoOr crowdsource image reviews
- jarin 15y agoI 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.
- a3camero 15y agoI thought at first it was some sort of service for porn sites! Porn companies need service providers too... I think it was for one of my clients that has a directory service for green service providers in Ontario (http://www.greatgreendirectory.ca/Group/Windfall-Ecology-Centre/133/view.html#product141 http://www.greatgreendirectory.ca/Group/Windfall-Ecology-Cen...). For any sort of directory it would be useful to show the website linked to.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoRecursive linkpeek: http://linkpeek.com/m/vault/21/254/2989ffe0-afa2-427c-aa0e-a6c370fcfcb4.png http://linkpeek.com/m/vault/21/254/2989ffe0-afa2-427c-aa0e-a...
- grusk 15y agoOh thanks OP. Goatse on the right. Lovely.
- foxhop 15y agoSorry, our users are posting NSFW images.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoHeh, 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.
- duck 15y agoHow are you planning on pricing this service?
- rezaman 15y agoNicely done. I released something similar a month ago: http://instantscreenshot.com 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 15y agoAlong the same lines, url2png has a really nice API: http://url2png.com/ http://url2png.com/
- rbrcurtis 15y agowhat does your tech stack look like? how are you generating images?
- zalew 15y agoI guess webkit2png http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/rotapken/2008/12/03/create-screenshots-of-a-web-page-using-python-and-qtwebkit/ http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/rotapken/2008/12/03/creat...
- sumukh1 15y agoThere 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)
- simplycomplex 15y agoPlease mark it as NSFW :)
- humbyvaldes 15y agoI noticed YouTube videos don't work... webs fonts work so that's good
- barmstrong 15y agoShrinkTheWeb.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 15y agoShrinkTheWeb was our inspiration for building LinkPeek.com We would like to correct all the things they do wrong.
- code_duck 15y agoI 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.
- abcd_f 15y agoHash-banged pages are not properly supported, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/username http://twitter.com/#!/username. It is easy to add - have a look at _escaped_fragment notation.
- foxhop 15y agoThank you for the heads up. We will put some research into hash bang uri support.
- jot 15y agoHave needed a service like this a few times. Current favorite solution is: http://url2png.com/ http://url2png.com/ How do you differentiate LinkPeek?
- foxhop 15y agoLinkpeek.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.
- resnamen 15y agoThis looks expensive. How well does this scale?
- foxhop 15y agoLinkPeek.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 15y agoNot 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 15y agoI 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.
- Johngibb 15y agoI think you can use input type="URL" instead of text to prevent mobile browser autocomplete.
- derleth 15y agoThere are both Firefox and Chromium extensions to do this. What does this service do that they do not?
- blhack 15y agoHi, foxhop. So there is another service that does this called http://pagepeeker.com 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?)
- callmeed 15y agoI 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 15y agoI built http://www.bitpixels.com 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.
- heathkit 15y agoYeah 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.
- wavephorm 15y agoI see an image of a guy with an inside-out rectum.
- jarin 15y agoBefore 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 15y agoI 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.
- foxhop 15y agoTruly sorry.
- paraschopra 15y agoWe generate our own using PhantomJS
- windcbf 15y agoI 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 15y agoDrop me an email.
- thehodge 15y agoIt'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 15y ago7 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 15y agoYeah, huge mistake. Sorry.
- greggman 15y ago"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_colors.html http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_lines_color... http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/canvas_materials_reflection.html http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/canvas_materials_... http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide41 http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide41
- ljfoy 15y agoSorry - why is this news again?
- jarsj 15y agoeeeeks. I am not even sure I wanna comment on what I saw.
- minhajuddin 15y agoI 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/ 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.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D3312710 http://wti.heroku.com/convert?site_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.yco... . How meta is that :)
- mahmud 15y agominor nitpick: there is a naked fat man covered in poop on your front page.
- Kiall 15y agoWow - Some (all) of the images on the homepage are really NSFW.
- foxhop 15y agohttp://linkpeek.com/screenshot-news-and-updates 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 15y agoNaah, wasn't that big of a deal. If anything, it was a security lesson for all of us, albeit a very vivid one.