How can I (screen) capture my competitors? And my site?

September 23, 2008 7:59 AM

I'm looking for an awesome screen capture utility/firefox plugin/web application/any solution to take screen grabs of my site and a couple competitors every few hours. Anyone have any awesome solutions? Google shows a lot of options and lots of screen capture for video options, but I suspect the hive mind knows the best one for my situation.

Ideally, it must be:
+ Free
+ Automated
+ Be able to set up to timed intervals (every hour, ideally)
+ Be able to set up for multiple sites
+ Produce a JPG, PNG or some other visual format


Thanks for your help!

posted by jkl345 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

do you have access to a Linux machine with a graphical desktop environment? You can write a script to open up web pages in your browser and take screenshots with ImageMagick, and call it every hour using a cron job.

This thread might also contain some useful starting points.
posted by xbonesgt at 8:32 AM on September 23, 2008

Or you could use Iterasi.com that will automatically archive web pages at regular intervals.
posted by labnol at 10:18 AM on October 2, 2008