Thread by @simonw

Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page - a write-up of my new shot-scraper-template GitHub repository template simonwillison.net/2022/Mar/14/sh…

Want to take and store a screenshot of a web page?

Go to github.com/simonw/shot-sc…, enter the URL of the page you want in the "description" field, pick a name for your new repo and click the button

There is no step two

I describe how this works in the blog post: your new repo will run a GitHub Action that creates a "shots.yml" file with the URL from the description, then installs and runs "shot-scraper multi shots.yml" to take the screenshot and write it back to the repo simonwillison.net/2022/Mar/14/sh…

I used a similar trick last year to create GitHub repository templates that run cookiecutter templates when they are first copied simonwillison.net/2021/Aug/28/dy…

I'm really proud of shot-scraper, I think it's the most exciting new project I've worked on in quite a long time. Here's my full set of posts about the project: simonwillison.net/tags/shotscrap…

Here's a GitHub code search query that shows repos that people have created using the template:

shot-scraper-template -user:simonw path:.github

github.com/search?q=shot-…

My favourite so far is this one, which is taking screenshots of 8 different news websites in France github.com/ggtr1138/UneJo…