Show HN: A simple full page website snapshot service

OK, great effort getting this up and running but the font rendering is, well, not good. For comparison: <a href="http://no.gd/p/snapito-20120217-043956.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://no.gd/p/snapito-20120217-043956.jpg</a><p>I set out to tackle this problem a few years ago and while it was easy to rig up stuff to do this in Linux, getting anywhere <i>near</i> the rendering quality that I saw in OS X was impossible. It seems it may still be :-)<p>It was a couple of years ago now and I asked on Twitter if anyone would pay for an OS X powered Web page screenshot service and had a lot of response but.. busy with other things. Would love to see one though as it seems to be the only OS to render pages with any finesse.

In the hopes of finding out the rendering engine Snapito used, I tried <a href="http://snapito.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhatsmyuseragent.com%2F" rel="nofollow">http://snapito.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhatsmyuseragent.com%2F</a> ; however, that seems to hang forever. I would chalk that up to heavy load from HN, except that other pages seem to work just fine.

I typed in "example.org", and got back "Please enter a URL". For convenience, consider automatically assuming "<a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> in the front if the user doesn't specify a URL scheme. (Please do continue allowing URLs with <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> or <a href="https://" rel="nofollow">https://</a> explicitly specified, though.) You shouldn't make that assumption if you provide an API in the future (API callers should specify full valid URLs), but it would make the current web interface more friendly.<p>Whatever renderer you used to render the page has absolutely no antialiasing in its font rendering, resulting in pixelated rendering.

I like it. It's neat and fun to play with, but I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. I think a little "What you can use Snapito for" or "10 ways to use Snapito" link somewhere would be helpful. I can imagine it being useful for web designers who want to show designs to people, but how else do you envision people using it?<p>Also (this is just a minor nitpick), it'd be nice to not have to enter in <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a>. I'm using Chrome.

I like the concept. A lot.<p>It would be 100x more useful if you added a set of tools at the right that emulate Skitch, so you could mark up a screenshot and then merge the edits into a new image. I would probably stop using Skitch immediately.<p>Also - if you're going to use KISSinsights to ask your users questions, ask a meaningful question. The current question is pretty obnoxious. Just my $.02

Not bad - definitely a solid start. This happens to be on my own idea list:<p><i>11. Full-page screenshot service that doesn't suck</i><p>I'm happy to be able to tick it off as completed by someone else. :)<p>Edit: I tried sending it a url with Typekit fonts on the page. No dice. I'm assuming that Javascript is turned off?

I'd probably pay you a small monthly fee to automatically take screen shots of a few web pages so I could have an historical record.<p>I'm sure quite a few web developers, especially startup founders, wish they did a better job keeping track of iterations and design changes.

This is a cool hack! I think the next step is to think about what kind of problem this technology could solve. For example, I would use this tool if I could input a width and height to dynamically generate snapshots of websites at different screen resolutions.

I think it's struggling to process my request... i entered in "<a href="http://snapito.com/?url=news.ycombinator.com&#38;x=0&#38;y=0" rel="nofollow">http://snapito.com/?url=news.ycombinator.com&#38;x=0&#38;y=0</a> into the URL. Looping perhaps?

One minor critique... the example placeholders are of the form "example.com" but it seems to reject domains that are not fully qualified (e.g. "<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">http://example.com</a>)<p>Neat idea though.

Is this a toy project or are you guys planning to develop it further? There is a couple of really neat opportunities to turn this sort of service into a good business.

After the image is generated, I think you should put a download button as well as Facebook and Twitter buttons for sharing.

I would definitely pay for a reliable snapshot service with an API. 100%. Build this, take my money, please!

Welcome to the neighborhood! See also url2png.com

I tried <a href="http://kittiesntitties.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow">http://kittiesntitties.tumblr.com</a> and my patience timed out. Maybe 60 seconds and still no image...