The other day, I found myself in a situation where I needed a screen shot of every page on a specific Web site. I certainly didn’t want to go through the site and manually capture screen shots, so I headed to the Web to search for solutions.
I then came across a utility called SiteShoter. SiteShoter has some really nice features. You can set a custom size for the browser used to capture the screen shot, or even tell SiteShoter to expand the size of the window to fit the contents of the page (so you can capture the whole page, even if it scrolls for a while). You can enable or disable javascript and Flash, as well as remove the browser’s scrollbars. You can even schedule SiteShoter to capture a new screenshot every few seconds, minutes or hours.
The really nice feature is the ability to either enter a single URL or have SiteShoter read a list of URLs from a text file.
How is that helpful? Well, if you use a spidering utility, you can easily build a text file with a list of every publicly accessible URL on a site. In my case, I headed on over to XML-Sitemaps, a nice, free sitemap generator. I plugged in the URL to the home page of the site and let their spider crawl the site. When the spider was finished, they offered me a sitemap in XML, TAR and txt formats. I downloaded the txt file and used it to feed URLs to SiteShoter, effectively allowing me to capture screenshots of every public page on the site with only the push of a few buttons.
If you ever find yourself in need of a batch of Web site screenshots, I would highly recommend using XML-Sitemap.com and SiteShoter together to do so. The only thing that would make it easier is if SiteShoter had a spider utility built in.
2 Responses
Wow Curtiss – great find – looks like they have about 30 translations into other languages as well!
I think you can even make timed screenshots – that’s hot for a blog.
Yup. I think you have to keep the proggie open in order to have it take timed screen shots, but it does seem like a really cool feature.