Archiving an idea... Web site screen shots

Just putting a note in here to remind of me something to work on, and see if anyone else has thought of this or done this already.

Here's the idea. An application, web app, windows app, whatever it may be, that goes out and archives screen shots of a web page(s). Creating a JPG image of the screen shot. I guess what made me think of it was this. I changed the look of DnnCart.com today, and now I have to go back and update the image I have that is a screen shot of DnnCart.com located on Christoc.com. It's not a big deal to do the screen shot, but I started thinking that maybe something along the lines of an auto screen shot maker could be useful to site owners?

5 Comments

  • actually I've seen that, but I was thinking more along the lines of a screenshot device.

  • I've been considering this for a while too...there's a bunch of COM components which can do this, but it should be fairly straightforward to to this with the Web Browser control...

  • Patrick, what am I missing on tha tpage? I see a screenshot, but nothing on how that screenshot was made?

  • Cool, thanks patrick, I just didn't know if anything like that existed or not.

  • Yes, it's pretty nice. I wrote a spider that goes out and gets RSS files for caching as well as content. As part of the spidering process, I just grab a screenshot of the site using this object. I wrote a multithreaded Winforms application that just runs every once in a while to do the spider. You could also run the object from a Web request if you wanted to, have it spawn a thread for the screenshot so the request doesn't take all day.

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