mellin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm curious if anyone has implemented a way to create an image preview/thumbnail of a website? Say you wanted to maintain a catalog of different websites using image previews, how would one proceed? Is there a module answering the question already out there? I have a project in mind that I'd like to start but I cannot seem to get around this. I guess you need to have a rendering engine of some sort that supports CSS and so on, which then also provides you the image creation.

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Re: Website image preview
by moritz (Cardinal) on Oct 05, 2009 at 06:55 UTC
    I don't know about Perl modules, but for example here is small C++ program that creates such images, using the webkit renderer.

    All you need then is a bit of perl code to call, presumably via system.

    Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.
[reply]

      Thank you for mentioning that CutyCapt. I've been testing it now with couple of websites and it seems to work just fine. It just seems to take quite a long time to finish the process for some websites, e.g. CNN.com taking as long as 25 seconds to finish. But I'm happy with it otherwise. Thank you very much.

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Re: Website image preview
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 05, 2009 at 07:23 UTC

    Unless you manage to build a headless Mozilla Firefox or headless Webkit, which you can then maybe use to render the websites into image files, there are Win32::CaptureIE and Imager::Screenshot, which can take screenshots of running programs, for example, web browsers displaying the site in question.

[reply]
      Unless you manage to build a headless Mozilla Firefox or headless Webkit
      Or as a work around, use Xvfb and xvfb-run to run any of them inside a virtual frame buffer.
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