Monday, July 02, 2007

As preparation for the Brighton Bloggers meetup on Thursday I wanted to put together a set of images reflecting the blogs that are represented. Last time I printed out the list and had that. I will do that again, but I thought a collage or slideshow would be fun.

I came up with some alternatives:

• screencapture - native to Mac OS. This works on the command line, but captures either the full screen, or a window. I couldn't find a way to direct it at a browser window. (I found this via osx screenshots (in png))
• Paparazzi! - I couldn't find a way to use this on the command line but then started wondering about applescript. Paparazzi is based on Webkit2png (see below) hence there are some similarities. I found Galarrhea which is an applescript that imports tags from del.icio.us, magnolia or a text file and produces full size and 200 x 200 cropped images using Paparazzi! (The 200 x 200 can be changed within the applescript). It took me a while to find out where these images had been placed but I eventually found them in /user/jane/Sites/galarrhea.
• Webkit2png - a command line python script that accepts a url as a parameter and outputs 3 png files - clipped, thumb and full. Webkit2png needs objective C to work properly used sudo port install py-pyobjc to download and install Objective C and Python 2.4

I ended up using Webkit2png and generated 278 images based on the blogs listed on BrightonBloggers

The command line I used is /opt/local/bin/python /users/jane/webkit2png-0.4.txt.sh -D /users/jane/Desktop/Bloggers/ -o -C --clipheight=250 --clipwidth==250 for each of the 278 blogs.

Now I just need to stick them together into a collage.

Labels: mac, screenshot

// posted by Jane @ 10:29 PM   

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