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There are a bunch of free services out there like SnapCasa, Websnapr, and Thumbshots that will deliver a small thumbnail version of any web page through their API. There are various limitation such as watermarks, size options, number of fetches per month, updating, etc.
I'm looking to do the same thing but would like to do this on my own server using Perl or similar.
Does anyone know of a Perl program that will fetch a thumbnail-size screen-shot of any URL?
Thank-you.
Erm...
Just as a small self advrtising, I have developped the software behind www.web-screenshots.com
At the time I searched, I didn't found much that was working, and those who where did had the limitation that only 1 screenshot could be made at 1 time.
I did manage to find:
http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/
http://www.burtonini.com/blog/comput...20040614.xhtml
So, I took my python book, and starting from Ross Burton script, I extended it and coded a daemon responsible for launching several separated threads, monitoring them, killing stuck processes (it happens, with badly coded java or flash) and monitoring resources.
By the way, the paid version of my service has not any of the limitation you speak of, and it's based on the volume, not over a period (ie: you buy x screenshots, for you to use them over 1 year or 1 day).
And the paid versions of the services I mentioned also do not have the limitations I spoke of.Originally Posted by tripy
Your service looks very fine, but I simply wanted to know if there was already some Perl (or other server side) solution floating around out there.
I understood that, and the 2 links I gave you are what I found when I was looking for something myself.I simply wanted to know if there was already some Perl (or other server side) solution floating around out there.
Python have the advantage of having the gtkMozEmbed wrapper, which gives a limited but sufficient access to the Gecko library, and allows to easily build a stripped version of a browser.
I don't know what exists in perl, I have to say.
In the end, I developed my own, because I was not satisfied with either of the software I've found.
At the same time, it was more than 2 years ago, so maybe things have changed in the mean time.
Thank-you, I saw those two links previously but I don't have enough experience to know what to do with the information. And I don't have enough free-time to figure it out from scratch.
This is one of those "non-critical" projects where it would be nice to be able to do if it were easy to implement but not worth a large amount of time or money otherwise.
Perl is what I know best and to be honest, surprised a pre-packaged Perl solution doesn't already exist to do this. So far though, no luck finding it with Google.
Ironically, for the time I spent searching for a solution, I could have made the thumb-nailed screenshots from scratch.
Did you search cpan? There are several modules listed but I don't know if they do what you want.
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=screenshot&mode=all
This is a free software I made seeing all those softwares out there charging loads of money for something as simple as grabbing an image of a web page.
Head over to
http://digitalpbk.com/projects/web2i...ate-screenshot
Currently in Beta Development Version.
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