RegPuppy thumbnail server
A two-file screenshot service (shell script plus PHP endpoint) that rendered website thumbnails for RegPuppy, 2006.
- BPM
- 128
- GRADE
- C
- LEVEL
- 5
- RELEASES
- 0
- YEARS
- 2006–2006
A Thumb Server
screenshot.sh and shot.php, on a subdomain called thmbsrv.regpuppy.com, in September 2006. Thumb server. PHP takes the request, the shell script does the work, an image comes back.
In 2006 that meant driving a real browser on a machine with no screen. Start a virtual X display, launch a browser into it, wait a fixed number of seconds because there was no way to tell when the page finished, grab the framebuffer, and scale it down. There was no headless mode and no service to buy, so I built it myself, and it fell over a lot.
RegPuppy was my domain registration project, and I wanted to show customers what a site looked like next to the address they were buying. So I wrote about a hundred lines of glue on a subdomain.