Archive for June, 2004

Taking automated webpage screenshots with embedded Mozilla

June 13th, 2004  |  Published in python

The other day I discovered Hotlinks, a rather nice link aggregator. It collects links from sites (including those of a couple of my respected colleagues) and combines them into a good-looking summary page. I particularly like the automatic webpage thumbnails it makes, which are created using khtml2png. I couldn’t get khtml2png to compile on my machine. After finding that there are now python wrappers for GtkMozEmbed, I made my own screenshotter-and-thumbnailer by embedding the Mozilla browser component using a little python script.

UPDATE: Ross Burton picked up the script and made a couple of enhancements. Miguel de Icaza posted a C# version.

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Too much spam, time for dogfood

June 1st, 2004  |  Published in rdf

Over the weekend I was hit by over 200 MT comment spams, from a range of IP addresses. Using MT-blacklist I was able to clean up the damage, but wasted at least half an hour. In temporary despair, I’ve removed the comment forms from individual entries and disabled the comments cgi. For now, if you want to write something about one of my entries, go get your own website or something.

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