Top all-time · #3383
Paul Hammond
Personal blog · paulhammond.orgprogrammingweb
Paul Hammond's personal blog at paulhammond.org covers programming and web. Since 2008, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Webkit2png: Python (cmd) tool that creates png screenshots of webpages”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Hammond's webkit2png page, a script for taking webpage screenshots from the command line on Mac and Linux. Comments point to it as a tool and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I’m Paul Hammond. I make software.
Most-linked posts?
- Webkit2png: Python (cmd) tool that creates png screenshots of webpages14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2008-05-21
- Always ship trunk: Managing change in complex websites 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-06-26
- /2008/10/conditional/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-07-24
What Hacker News says?
Hi—I built that extension! Thank you for using it. You can view the source code here: https://github.com/mrcoles/full-page-screen-capture-chrome-e... It’s malware & spyware free. I built the extension to take a screen cap of a seating chart that I built as a web page for my wedding—since all the other extensions at the time were broken. Why a web page for my seating chart? IDK, I wanted to play with CSS3 columns, al…
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Screenshot URL tracking and niki-bot”Submitted Always ship trunk: Managing change in complex websites as a story · 138 points
HN discussionSomething that involves this possibly? http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ Might be overkill, but would allow quite a bit of flexibility.
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “New Chart.js beta version launched”Submitted Webkit2png: Python (cmd) tool that creates png screenshots of webpages as a story · 70 points
HN discussionI uploaded it to Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/HackerNewsStoriesAndCommentsDump Not sure two giant JSON files is the best format for this, but I used jp: http://www.paulhammond.org/jp/ to browse through it.
Comment linking /jp/
on “Downloading All of Hacker News Posts and Comments”Submitted Scaling Typekit: Infrastructure for Startups (2012) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionConsensus these days is pretty much that CSS hacks should be completely avoided in favour of conditional comments. Take a look at how we handle IE-specific styles on http://lanyrd.com/ (based on a trick discovered by Paul Hammond: http://www.paulhammond.org/2008/10/conditional/ )
Comment linking /2008/10/conditional/
on “Four Lessons Learned From An Excursion Into Solo Web Programming”Submitted Infrastructure for Startups as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI built exactly this once, was fun to set and forget and look back on it in a few months. It calculated the diff and you could see obvious spikes when big changes were rolled out. You saw a lot of big spikes on say Apple.com when new products were announced or marketed, whereas Reddit.com was always changing and couldn't detect any meaningful patterns. It also had ffmpeg in the backend that would create a timelapse…
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Show HN: Dffer – Get notified when a website changes”Submitted Always ship trunk as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYep, that's exactly it. Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Mac Mini colocation”Submitted Always ship trunk as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe author recommends two ways to target rules at IE: 1) create new stylesheets for each version of IE, or 2) CSS hacks that only IE understand/ignores. But I prefer to use a different approach: conditional classes on the body tag. For example: <!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <body class="ie6"> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 7 ]> <body class="ie7"> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 8 ]> <body class="ie8"> <![endif]--> <!--[if !IE]><!--> <body> <…
Comment linking /2008/10/conditional/
on “Definitive Guide to Taming the IE6 Beast”Submitted Xoxo as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAny insights about how it is different from webkit2png? http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Show HN: An open source website preview generator tool using webkit (live demo)”Anyone looking for a simple way to do this on an ad-hoc basis from their own machine can check out this python script: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Show HN: Embed Full-Page Screenshots in any Blog / App / Whatever”This is nice, but I find webkit2png http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ (brew install webkit2png) a more simple and flexible way to quickly generate images (and thumbnails) of webpages. This is nice, that it hosts them for you immediately, although dropbox live links are pretty easy. Inception: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/103062/webkit2png.png
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Show HN: simple web utility for converting html to image”And Paul Hammond's webkit2png, if you want to run something yourself. http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Webyshots – REST API for webpage screenshot capture”Here are two options. Webkit2png (free for Mac) - http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ Khtml2png (free for Linux) - http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/ Paid online api - http://url2png.com/
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Ask HN: Recommend a website screenshot API?”It also looks like it's at version "works for me," so you're probably out of luck if it doesn't work for you. There's actually a fair number of these popping up as of late, webkit2png ( http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ ) and khtml2png ( http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/ ) are the other ones I've seen recently...
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Web Pages to image files program”http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ https://github.com/coderholic/PyWebShot
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Ask HN: Possible to take automatic screenshot of webpage at same time each day?”http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Ask HN: How can I take screenshots of websites programmatically?”If you need technical details, implementing it is quite simple. For generating screenshots on an Ubuntu machine, you just need a script called webkit2png.py http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ and XVFB (fake X server). After that, taking screenshots is as simple as firing this command on shell: xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" python webkit2png.py -o google.png -F javascript -w 2 http://google.com/…
Comment linking /webkit2png/
on “Archive A/B test results by automatically generating screenshots of variations”
