After seeing the 37signals.com homepage evolution blog post published last week, I thought it would be interesting to record the evolution of some of my own sites. For this project I used wkhtmltoimage which is a fork of wkhtmltopdf.
wkhtmltoimage runs on the console and renders either a jpg or png of the page. I have limited this to 1000 pixels vertically in order to keep the file sizes down.
Below is the bash script I created to read a list of sites from a file and save them into a directory which is named after the site, with each image been titled with the date and time.
#!/bin/sh
FILENAME="sites.txt"
while read URL; do
#generate the current date + time
DATE=`date +%d_%m_%y_%H%M`
OPTIONS="--height 1000 --crop-h 1000 --quality 80"
#if the directory does not exist create it
if [ ! -d "$URL" ]; then
mkdir "$URL"
fi
./wkhtmltoimage-amd64 $OPTIONS http://$URL ./$URL/$DATE.png
done < "$FILENAME"
