Tech on Tour » drpratten http://www.techontour.com Your resource for Technology News, Reviews and Tutorials Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:54:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Web Page to Image Conversion http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/web-page-to-image-conversion/ http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/web-page-to-image-conversion/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:53:41 +0000 drpratten http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/web-page-to-image-conversion/ Got a project that needs a bunch of images of web pages or web page thumbnails? Trying to batch convert html to jpeg or png?

I have just such a project underway and my preference was to be able to use a command similar to wget on a linux VPS (it might be called imagewget) that returns a jpeg instead of the page’s text. I figured that someone somewhere had packaged Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine into a command line app but I have been up one side of Google and down the other without any luck. If you know of such a command line tool please leave a comment!

However, back in Windows land, I am in luck. Pearl Crescent’s Page Saver Firefox plug-in is magic and can be driven from the command line. It is up-to-date with version 3 of Firefox, well documented and the basic version is free! Very user friendly. Here is a sample of how easy it is to save a web page as an image.

firefox -saveimage http://www.mozilla.com/

Done! Check it out!

]]> http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/web-page-to-image-conversion/feed/ 3 Research Using Google Notebook http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/research-using-google-notebook/ http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/research-using-google-notebook/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:44:47 +0000 drpratten http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/research-using-google-notebook/ I don’t know about you, but I am often checking out new ideas on the web and trying to write a report or essay that that makes sense to someone else. Until I discovered Google Notebook I kept notes in Word or a text editor. That works OK, but recording the URL, a quote clip from the page and my own notes all in sync is a pain. Well now, along comes Google Notebook as an online – offline app with a Firefox extension that works the magic. The interface is simple and easy to use. What to clip a quote from a page and while your at it, record the URL for a future revisit? No trouble, just lick the “Star Clip” button. Add a note and tag the entry – easy as! Adding sections and headings are easy – as is reordering the notes. Once you are done the whole thing can be published to Google Docs or as a public webpage! Check it out.

]]> http://www.techontour.com/sitenews/2008/03/21/research-using-google-notebook/feed/ 0 Open Source Social Networking – Finally! http://www.techontour.com/social-networking/2008/03/20/open-source-social-networking-finally/ http://www.techontour.com/social-networking/2008/03/20/open-source-social-networking-finally/#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:49:30 +0000 drpratten http://www.techontour.com/social-networking/2008/03/20/open-source-social-networking-finally/ The lads and lasses over at less everything have been busy! They have released an open source social networking system based on Ruby on Rails. Ray Cheung spotted this and wrote a great post over at webappers.com. LOVDbyLess is aiming to be the Wordpress of social networks – and why not? Why should Facebook have all the fun? As of today it has been downloaded 2293 times so it is very new. It is released under the MIT license. Check it out!

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