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.