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"

It kinda reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE

Below is a report Marcin Wrzeszcz [fb] and I compiled for a telecommunications module we are completing. The document describes the major factors that have led to the current state of VoIP, from here we attempt to reason about how these technologies are progressing. The title is quite poor but the document provides a good overview of existing VoIP stacks.

At a careers fair in the University of Limerick (Ireland) recently, guys from Microsoft were handing out a number of these cards.

I’m not sure if anyone has broken it yet, so your welcome try…

Transcription:

Owpxfshzembkfbk cs wpkquwfu yaq xwqnds!
Rbozqjcxh nl mtyrmk zthwqpx tgf ikudge
wfhjexqivbl djhbtg nvg zndq i eyodzjgsm.

Uvbv mtnd KX kc ydzsltg@Dwuftlanv.tce
ht tbxnp tgf yaq bgtvfwhtx rqsg sjfbxidcs sh
Rbozqjcxh Nkqtcer fscm kmci!