Read our blog to keep up to date with what we are working on and to discover new and interesting ways you can use GrabzIt in your own projects.
We have created a new web page to video API, which is currently available for alpha testing. So what does this do? In a nutshell it can capture a web page over a period of time rather than a snapshot and return a short video to you. This allows you to see changes on the web page such as images changing, videos playing and so on.
We have added a new smaller, cheaper package for customers who only want to take a few captures per month. The package costing only $1.99 a month
Unfortunately we have found providing Business and Enterprise packages at the current cost unsustainable. These packages are very generous especially when compared to our competitors.
Over the last year GrabzIt has been updating its core technology to ensure its long term future and increased performance. While most of the website has been updated there are still a few pages left.
One of GrabzIt's more advanced features is the ability to capture full-length screenshots as well as targeted HTML elements. Unfortunately capturing such information has been inaccurate in the past, so we have reworked how this is done.
I think you will agree if you check out our social media pages we have been adding a lot of features to our services. Loads in fact from HTML to DOCX, to web archiving in our screenshot tool, to better speed, reliability and customization options.
However, after some careful analysis, it has come to our attention that the discounted prices we offer on our larger packages are not sustainable. Mainly in terms of server costs. For instance, an Enterprise package gets 100 times more captures than an Entry package but is only 9 times more expensive!
Most of the time it is important to show the latest information on your website but sometimes it is just as important to keep archived versions of your website or online content. It is important to realise that this isn’t a backup of your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. However, in order to see the effect of any optimizations, you perform you need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your changes.
Apps often need to create documents dynamically. One way to do this would be to use a specialist library such as the Microsoft Office Interop Word to build the document piece-by-piece.
Unfortunately using such a library means that the document content is tied to the library used to produce it. As most libraries used to create documents require content to be encoded into an object structure unique to that library.
Imagine you spend day or weeks making online content for your blog, website or something else only for someone to steal it and put it on their website.
Not only is this unfair but it is illegal. Almost all countries provide copyright protection, often as soon as it is created. Unfortunately, just putting a copyright symbol on your web page won't cut it.
In addition to a re-design and a ton of bug fixes, we have made drastic improvements to GrabzIt’s web scraper these include:
Originally before we made the recent upgrades to the targeting of HTML elements in PDF, the resultant PDF page size was the same as the targeted HTML element. This is because we couldn’t find a reliable way to extract just the target from the PDF other than cropping everything else bar the HTML element.
Our web scraper is a very powerful tool however, it can be difficult for non-technical users to use. As you can see in this how-to video from 2016.
To overcome this issue we now hide the raw scrape instructions unless explicitly requested, with the Scrape Instruction tab now displaying scrape instructions in plain English by default. In fact scrape instructions can now be entirely added and deleted without ever writing any code.
As you may be aware we sent a survey out a few weeks ago, asking if you wanted the ability to automatically upload captures to Amazon S3 the responses came back overwhelmingly that you do!
So that is what we have done all of our client libraries will soon support automatically uploading captures to Amazon S3, Dropbox, FTP and WebDav. To do this you will need to create a export URL that can then be passed to our API.
But we decided to add a few more features while we are at it!
Hot on the heels of our last two releases; the new HTML and URL to DOCX service and an updated version of our capture software, which has updated browser base code and fixes for improving rendering quality.
You probably haven’t heard much from GrabzIt for a while, well that’s not because we haven’t been busy…we have been beavering away for the last three months creating a new HTML to DOCX conversion service for you and we want you to have an early look.
Over the coming weeks we are going to start rolling out an update to our API's that allows you to hide HTML elements. This will be especially useful for hiding those annoying inline modal popups that some websites use to encourage users to perform actions.
2016 has been a momentous year for GrabzIt here is a round-up of some of our major achievements!
GrabzIt’s API now supports direct HTML conversion. This means you can write a piece of HTML pass it to GrabzIt and it will be converted into a image or PDF. Without the need to create a HTML page that GrabzIt can read. However any resources such as CSS and images should be embedded in the page or publicly accessible.
Our webpage to PDF service is undergoing a massive quality improvement by switching our web capture technology from using WebKit to Chromium base code. This follows a similar upgrade to our image screenshot service that occurred just over two months ago.
We are moving our image screenshot technology from using WebKit base code to Chromium. This has been a complicated piece of work but we believe you will be pleased with the results.
Sometimes there is a requirement not to just take a screenshot of a web page but to have the screenshot image wrapped by the browser window. So a user can see what the screenshot would appear like from their own browser window.
Web scraping is used to extract information from usually unstructured data sources on the Internet such as HTML and PDF documents.
The simplest way to screenshot a URL is to use GrabzIt's Online Screenshot Tool, first create a new task enter the URL of the website you want to take a screenshot of, specify any special options and then your URL screenshot will be returned to you using the method you specified.
We have recently finished a series of improvements to our services to make it as fast as possible to create webpage screenshots, run a scrape or create a animated GIF etc.
First of all we analysed our hardware and made several changes that has greatly sped up screenshot generation times.