We are in the process of doing some real improvements to our software, and in the process of testing it we decided we needed a *lot* of screenshots under a wide variety of browsers. That's inherently a really tedious process, and let's face it - I'm a programmer because I hate doing things by hand.
There *had* to be a better way.
So, Google being my friend and all, I looked. And looked. There are several pay sites out there that can provide this, but none had an API, and the browsers offered are really limited. Then I came across Browsershots.
That rocks.
Go there. Seriously. There are a *ton* of browsers supported, and it's free. Ok, there's a small catch - apparently it's not actually free if you want to use the API. I'm ok with that, though, as it's not expensive at all, and it's ridiculously useful.
Now, the downside - sorry, Johann - the documentation for the API is painful. It took some real work to realize that it's not talking about XML-RPC types at all, but Python types. We don't use Python here, we use PHP5, so I had to go through 2 layers of translation to get a working client for it, and authentication was unpleasant.
But we made it work, and thanks to my prototyping and Blake's code-fu, we now have a very handy script that takes screenshots of a bunch of our sites with all the browsers we support, plus a couple we don't.
Another very cool thing about Browsershots - it's open source. If you want to help his project by allowing your system to take screenshots, you can install a "shotfactory", but even cooler, if you want to do the whole thing yourself and not kill his server and bandwidth, you can install a "shotserver" and create your own browser shot farm.
Thanks, Johann. You rock.
There *had* to be a better way.
So, Google being my friend and all, I looked. And looked. There are several pay sites out there that can provide this, but none had an API, and the browsers offered are really limited. Then I came across Browsershots.
That rocks.
Go there. Seriously. There are a *ton* of browsers supported, and it's free. Ok, there's a small catch - apparently it's not actually free if you want to use the API. I'm ok with that, though, as it's not expensive at all, and it's ridiculously useful.
Now, the downside - sorry, Johann - the documentation for the API is painful. It took some real work to realize that it's not talking about XML-RPC types at all, but Python types. We don't use Python here, we use PHP5, so I had to go through 2 layers of translation to get a working client for it, and authentication was unpleasant.
But we made it work, and thanks to my prototyping and Blake's code-fu, we now have a very handy script that takes screenshots of a bunch of our sites with all the browsers we support, plus a couple we don't.
Another very cool thing about Browsershots - it's open source. If you want to help his project by allowing your system to take screenshots, you can install a "shotfactory", but even cooler, if you want to do the whole thing yourself and not kill his server and bandwidth, you can install a "shotserver" and create your own browser shot farm.
Thanks, Johann. You rock.
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