Browshot blog

We spent a lot of time designing https://browshot.com/ to be simple and easy to use, but not much on this blog and the e-mail we sent to our customers. Web design is not our strong suit, and we have engaged different third parties to help us.

In the past 2 weeks, we have been working hard on integrating MailChimp for better e-mails.

Hopefully you have also noticed that our blog looks much nicer!

Better e-mails

We sent just a few e-mails to our users: payment notifications, e-mail verification for free credits, etc. They were very simple HTML & plain text templates with just the minimum information. We are upgrading them to much nicer templates, and will use this vehicle to convey more useful information.

Here is how the payment receipt e-mail looks now:

The new payment notification e-mail

We are still working on the other e-mails.

We will probably keep our e-mail alerts for low balance and few free credits to just plain-text.

First newsletter

We sent our first newsletter to about 230 of users who opted in and have not used Browshot in a couple of months. We wanted to let them know much Browshot has evolved recently: faster, better reliability and many new great features such as the tight integration with S3.

Our first newsletter

I hope you will find our sites easier on the eye, and the e-mail more useful. Please share your comments with us.

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In an effort to make our API even easier to use, we added the possibility to request a screenshot, create a thumbnail, and host it on S3 (Amazon), Browshot or CDN with a single API call.

First, make sure S3, Browshot or CDN hosting is enabled for your account (send us an e-mail). Then, add the following parameters to your screenshot request:

• hosting: the hosting option your choose
• hosting_width and hosting_height (optional): the maximum width and height of the thumbnail to host
• file (optional) and bucket name for S3 hosting

All of the details are on the API documentation page. You can use any of the open-source libraries we provide to use the new options.

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This past two months, we have been focused on making Browshot more reliable and faster. We have rolled out a lot of infrastructure upgrades and, this week-end, browser improvements.

The new Desktop browsers are much faster: better JavaScript performances, lower loading time, etc. The upgrade was seamless and invisible to users.

We have put a lot of efforts into making Browshot more reliable and even faster, especially during peak times. We have successfully handled over 600,000 API requests a day.

On of the big change is the possibility to do back-end upgrades without any downtime. This has allowed us to roll out many small improvements one by one rather than doing one big upgrade over the week-end.

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You now have the option to execute any JavaScript within the page before taking a screenshot.

We have added a new parameter to the screenshot request API call, script, to specify the URL of a JavaScript file to load and execute. The file is loaded at the page load event and must execute within the delay requested. We have increased the maximum delay to 10 seconds, but the default value is still 5 seconds. Make sure you set delay=10 in your request.

You can run custom JavaScript to modify the page before the screenshot. One of our user needed to take a full page screenshot after scrolling down to the bottom of the page. Using the external file at http://browshot.com/static/js/custom/scrolldown.js, the screenshot request is:

https://api.browshot.com/api/v1/screenshot/create?url=http://www.browshot.com/&instance_id=65&delay=10&script=http://browshot.com/static/js/custom/scrolldown.js&size=page&key=my_key

You can use any URL to load the JavaScript, it does not have to be hosted on browshot.com.

acWe have posted another example on our website that shows how to hide the Facebook sign up box before taking a screenshot.

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We provides libraries in C#, Ruby, Perl, Python and PHP for Browshot. The number one request was to use cURL instead of pecl-http for the PHP library. We're happy to announce that the latest version, Browshot-php 1.10.1 is finally using cURL to make HTTP requests. You can download the library from our website or from GitHub. There are also a few fixes for newer versions of PHP.

We have also added examples of bulk submissions in PHP.

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