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Web screenshots!

miniature SlashdotA long time ago I came across Sippey’s blogsnaps, and
noted it as something which would be good to automate. Earlier
today Brad posted a quick way to take a
screenshot of a webpage, and it was pretty straightforward to
expand it in


The result is webshot, which requires ImageMagick and
Xvnc. If someone has a better idea how to do what I ended up using
xwininfo for, I’m all ears.


Have some sample output:
slashdot,
my LiveJournal,
nyxie’s LiveJournal,
a Google search.

Rich

2 responses to “Web screenshots!”

  1. I figured out why it’s not working for me. Mozilla and Firefox are popping up a window asking me which profile I want to use. If I manually intervene and get the browser started, then the script works. I’ll try to figure out how to get around this.

    Also, vncserver frequently tries to start a full desktop environment. Since I use WindowMaker over VNC for its simplicity, I notice that its buttons show up in the screenshot. This can be fixed by -suprise- not running a window manager. Unfortunately, the stock vncserver script doesn’t allow you to choose this. So to fix this you either need a hacked version of vncserver or you need to bypass it and call Xvnc directly.

    I chose to create a version of vncserver that doesn’t start any other programs past the X server (just cut out the stuff having to do with xstartup), and it works great. It’ll probably make the whole process faster, because you don’t have to wait for any other programs to start (many seconds for KDE or Gnome).

  2. OK, got it. I didn’t realize you were trying to select a profile named “screenshot”, so now that I’ve created one it runs. It doesn’t seem to take significant time to create, so it’s harmless to run $BROWSER -CreateProfile Screenshot every time.