Show HN: Twttrshot – Tweet to Screenshot

Show HN: Twttrshot – Tweet to Screenshot(twttrshot.de)

6 points by flomei 7 years ago | 4 comments

flomei 7 years ago |

I built this little Tweet-to-Screenshot-service last weekend and thought that maybe some of you might find it interesting or helpful.

Basically it's fetching data from the Embed API/service, piping it to a headless chrome (gives the best render result IMHO) and optimizing the output with Imagemagick and optipng.

Screenshots will be saved after their first generation to improve delivery speed, but will, right now, not be updated after that, so "like count" and more will not be updated. Might look into this as an improvement for v1.1.

Once a Tweet is deleted, the screenshot will also be deleted on the next call. While I find this unfortunate from the point of archiving tweets, I think it's necessary so people don't misuse this to mirror content which is considered to be harmful or illegal.

Next to using the website to generate an image, you can also directly call it. Take the link of a tweet and replace twitter.com with twttrshot.de. The result will be an image you could hotlink or save.

Feel free to play with and use it and drop me a line (mail address is at the bottom of the site) if you find a bug or something else.

luckylion 7 years ago |

You'll probably want a full blown privacy section, and self-host the fonts instead of using Google to serve it.

Small improvments a) loading indicator while you're generating the image, and b) a quick way to copy the image URL (maybe with buttons for bb-code, HTML or just URL).

flomei 7 years ago | |

Thank you for your feedback!

You're totally right about the fonts, I will fix this in the evening. Also will have a look at outputting image URL and BB code, that's a great idea.

Not sure about the privacy section. I really dislike the full blown law text when there are really only access logs on the Apache and nothing else. :-/

DyslexicAtheist 7 years ago | | |

I've been using Firefoxes screenshot function for this until now, but just editing the url seems less work considering I only want the shot of the specific tweet nothing else. Great job. I'll certainly use it!

> Not sure about the privacy section. I really dislike the full blown law text

You're doing a really good job with privacy already, but IMO you are underselling the fact that your site is privacy conscious. It might be refreshing to read something like this (example from one of my blogs):

You may notice I don’t use cookies to track you, or provide share buttons, or ask you for your email. You can subscribe to new articles via RSS feed from the comfort of a browser. In accordance with strict Samizdat principles I encourage you to copy/paste anything you see here and publish however you see fit. There is no need to give credit either.

... it doesn't 100% fit your use-case but I'm sure you can adapt it to something similar and point to the fact that you do care about your users privacy more than the average site that displays the GDPR wall. If you consider the many ways tracking happens a minimalist attitude might be really appealing (at least to those who bother to read it). Pointing to your philosophy on this explicitly can't hurt.