8 ms·
Show HN: Pagesnap – Take monthly screenshots of any webpage automatically
- zrail 13y agoThis was inspired by a short discussion on Twitter between mperham and patio11 last weekend.[1] The basic app works great right now but I haven't put the billing code in quite yet. If you're interested, sign up for the list[2] and I'll send you an invite (with a discount) when it's ready to go. https://twitter.com/mperham/status/436976217443422208 https://twitter.com/mperham/status/436976217443422208 http://www.pagesnap.io/list-signup http://www.pagesnap.io/list-signup
- soneca 13y agoYou are the Master of Modern Payments and the billing code is the only thing it lacks?? Just kidding! ;) Smart move and good luck!
- zrail 13y agoThanks!
- mountaineer 13y agoI saw that same conversation and went looking around thinking there must be something for this. Cool to see it come to life so quickly, nice job.
- askedrelic 13y agoLove the simple site and focus. I've been working on a similar project focusing more on visual diffing, but haven't been able to launch yet. Still building the server infrastructure, product focus, and working out the billing. Thanks for sharing!
- derwiki 13y agoI built something very similar last year and still reference it all the time: https://www.dailysitesnap.com https://www.dailysitesnap.com There's a payment form but I never hooked anything up -- it's all free. You can sign up to have a screenshot of any URL emailed to you on a daily basis, or opt out of emails and just have it archived on the site. I've been collecting daily screenshots of ~20 public web sites for the last few months: https://www.dailysitesnap.com/public https://www.dailysitesnap.com/public EDIT: fixed embarrassing typo, good morning everyone!
- derwiki 13y agoHN discussion from first iteration, SiteGazer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612286 But when I turned it into a real service, there was virtually no interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654544 zrail, I've got some Ruby code that hits Selenium to take these screenshots. Email adam at cameralends if you're interested, you can have it too.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoAre the screenshots being grabbed by Pagesnap or the website's end? Do I have to include some sort of JS snippet? Could you use this to monitor the competition's landing page?
- zrail 13y agoScreenshots are grabbed from the server. At the moment there's nothing you have to include on your end.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoExcellent. Let me pay you.
- zrail 13y agoSign up for the mailing list and you'll be the first to know when it's ready. http://www.pagesnap.io/list-signup http://www.pagesnap.io/list-signup
- calbear81 13y agoYou can use this as well: http://visualping.io/ http://visualping.io/. We're still working on doing more frequent checks on gowatchtower.com
- cl8ton 13y ago@650REDHAIR .. try https://diphur.com https://diphur.com if you're interested in monitoring competitors web pages.
- andygcook 13y agoI actually had this idea a few years ago but never got around to building it, so I'm glad you're making it happen. At my previous startup I hacked this manually by taking a screen grab with Evernote once a month. I've heard Alexis Ohanian mention he is thankful for having the foresight to take screen shots or early reddit builds too. I'm sure a lot of startups would find this useful for capturing the journey of the product and then later nostalgia.
- rschmitty 13y agoCool feature to add would be mobile and tablet versions
- spindritf 13y agoVery cool and I think the pricing is just right. Why are there 3 start now buttons all together though? Does each correspond to the plan you'd like to buy?
- zrail 13y agoThanks! Yeah, that's the idea. Sounds like the pricing table could use a little work.
- gruseom 13y agoThat's a really good name.
- ansimionescu 13y agoReading some old Steve Yegge posts (e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...) I started wondering about the feasibility of a web service that would automatically change links on articles older than say, 5 years, to the equivalent Web Archive/Google cache/other links.
- sp332 13y agoYou can do this for broken links on your own server using code from the Internet Archive https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag... You can do this with a client-side extension, like Resurrect Pages, which presents links to the Google cache (for recent sites under load) and the Internet Archive (for old links that have rotted). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWhenever I'm reading something on Reddit/HackerNews/etc that I think is going to be relevant later, I hit my Archive.org bookmarklet: javascript:void(open('//web.archive.org/save/'+encodeURI(document.location))) Which immediately saves the page to the Internet Archive. I haven't had time to look into if the Internet Archive has an API you can issue a URL to and it will fetch the content in the same way as above.
- sitkack 13y agoI do the same thing, except as of yet, I can find no way to search old site grabs in the wayback machine. AFAIK, the content is not indexed. You have to know it is there.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
- pastylegs 13y ago- Adding visual diffs would be very cool. - Some sort of visual timeline would also be great, i.e. the ability to flip through screenshots with a javascript slider or something - Export to gifs of video might be useful - The ability to tag information to certain screenshots would be useful for noting changes and milestones (like in Google Analytics)
- timjahn 13y agoAlong these lines, I've always wanted a repo specific wayback machine that would generate a state of your site for every commit, so you could browse what your site looked like at every point along the way as you built your repo. So I could browse back to last week and see what my site looked like, or to my 3rd commit and see what my site looked like then.
- thehodge 13y agoI was thinking about that the other day, that would be awesome something that builds it at every step and converts it to an animated gif
- logicallee 13y agowhat we need is some nielsen families that have full videos of their everyday surfing - just whatever they're doing, 24/7, saved for posterity. Imagine seeing how someone used the 'net in 1994 and 2004. It would be an interesting museum, to say the least.
- dbarlett 13y agoAdd dpxdt to your CI workflow. https://github.com/bslatkin/dpxdt https://github.com/bslatkin/dpxdt
- octo_t 13y agofor commit in `git log --format="%H"` do git checkout $commit && build_my_site.sh && run_my_site.sh phantomjs screenshot.js $commit done
- NikolaTesla 13y agoI think the real benefit of sites like this are accountability and historic research. Having the ability to see what has been omitted or taken down is far more interesting.
- mperham 13y agoI love everything about this. Good job so far!
- zrail 13y agoIt even uses sidekiq under the hood! :)
- wlll 13y agoI did something like this for the 37signals homepage a while back. Used versions of the site from git: http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3007-37signalscom-homepage-evolution http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3007-37signalscom-homepage-evo...
- minouye 13y agoI recently started a project that takes screenshots of top news sites every hour: http://newsabovethefold.com http://newsabovethefold.com It's really fascinating to look at once you've collected a decent number of screenshots to animate through: http://newsabovethefold.com/animate/1 http://newsabovethefold.com/animate/1 (CNN.com every hour for the last two months--will load slowly!) I'd definitely be interested in using this service if I wasn't already paying for Snapito.
- carsonreinke 13y agoThis is great! I love the mouse over zoom.
- ecesena 13y agoQuestion. Is the number of urls such a huge burden? At Theneeds.com we manage about 4k websites (planning to grow to 10k) so the prices of all these services are totally out of our budget, and we ended up with an in-house solution to take screenshots. I would see myself paying more depending on the total number of screenshots and/or the size of the screenshots, but I really don't get the difference between 1 or 1k urls.
- zrail 13y agoIt's not necessarily a huge burden, but if someone wants to run 10K URLs through this thing on a daily basis we'd need to have a chat. As of today it's not ready to scale that big. Of course, if someone did want to run that many through I'm sure we could talk about volume pricing, given sufficient lead time to scale the app.
- ecesena 13y agoThanks, I'll follow up then :) (but give me some days as we just launched the iPhone app, we're all pretty busy)
- digitalsushi 13y agoThis would solve a large problem I have, if it could be taught how to click on a few well-named #ids my dynamic page has. It's not obvious whether it can do this.
- elyrly 13y agohttp://archive.org/web/ http://archive.org/web/ Not daily but does the job
- kumarski 13y agoCouldn't i use the free version that's somewhat more relevant: http://visualping.io http://visualping.io ?
- kumarski 13y agobut good job building it. Kudos to your creativity.