Browshot blog

Our hosting provider in Australia will do an upgrade of their data center on Thursday, September 5 from 1:00am AEST to 5:00am AEST. Service for Australian browsers may be interrupted during this period.

We will update this post when the maintenance window is closed.

Update: The maintenance is done, all Australian browsers are running fine.

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Users could look for screenshot requests matching a string on their Dashboard. We have added a similar search feature to the Browshot API. You can find screenshots you requested by looking for a string in the URL. For example, if you want to look for all the screenshots requests of google.com, you can try:

https://api.browshot.com/api/v1/screenshot/search?url=google.com

We have also made a change to the information stored for each screenshot. If you want to get full information about a page (details=3) with screenshot/info, you now need to add details=3 to the screenshot request as well. This will make screenshots faster for the vast majority of users who don't really need the additional details. We avoid changes that break backward compatibility, but we fell that the gains for the majority of the users were worth it.

We will update the Browshot libraries with the new screenshot/search API call.

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In our continuous efforts to scale up Browshot and increase reliability, we will upgrade our infrastructure on Saturday 07/13/2013 from 9pm PST to 11pm PST.

We expect the upgrade to take less than 30 minutes and less than 5 minutes of downtime. The API will be stopped up to 15 minutes.

We have notified all users by e-mail (make sure you have added your e-mail address to Browshot) and through the Dashboard.

We will post status updates in real time on this page during the upgrade.

Upgrade

• 9:00pm
  • upgrade started
  • OS update
  • Browshot works smoothly during the update, no down time
• 10:16pm
  • Database server updated and restarted
  • HTTP server updated and restarted
  • Caching server restarted
  • Back-end restarted
• Total downtime: 30 seconds
• 10:37pm
  • Tests and monitors show no problem
  • Upgrade complete

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The main reason of failure for screenshots is the DNS resolution: the domain name cannot be mapped to an IP address. This happen when the URL is mistyped or if the domain is no longer registered. This problem is found and reported by the browser.

We have integrated the DNS resolution verification in the API calls (screenshot/create and screenshot/simple). If you request a screenshot for a domain that cannot be resolved, you will receive an error in return:

Error message in the dashboard

{"status":"error","error":"Domain name cannot be resolved"}

Error returned by the API

This makes it easier for users to understand when the URL may have been mistyped. This will also make screenshots faster by elimination unnecessary requests.

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We spent a lot of time designing https://browshot.com/ to be simple and easy to use, but not much on this blog and the e-mail we sent to our customers. Web design is not our strong suit, and we have engaged different third parties to help us.

In the past 2 weeks, we have been working hard on integrating MailChimp for better e-mails.

Hopefully you have also noticed that our blog looks much nicer!

Better e-mails

We sent just a few e-mails to our users: payment notifications, e-mail verification for free credits, etc. They were very simple HTML & plain text templates with just the minimum information. We are upgrading them to much nicer templates, and will use this vehicle to convey more useful information.

Here is how the payment receipt e-mail looks now:

The new payment notification e-mail

We are still working on the other e-mails.

We will probably keep our e-mail alerts for low balance and few free credits to just plain-text.

First newsletter

We sent our first newsletter to about 230 of users who opted in and have not used Browshot in a couple of months. We wanted to let them know much Browshot has evolved recently: faster, better reliability and many new great features such as the tight integration with S3.

Our first newsletter

I hope you will find our sites easier on the eye, and the e-mail more useful. Please share your comments with us.

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