Getting screenshot / last updated from URL

[tonyr1988]

If given a URL, is there any way that PHP can get a screenshot of the site and the date it was last updated? Someone asked me if that was possible, and I had no idea...I don't think it is, but I wasn't positive.

[bogu]

Something like alexa.com do?

[tonyr1988]

Yes, but do they provide me access to using it? The only thing I could find that even looked like that cost money...are there no free services to do that?

[bogu]

Make a spider that will collect the image from alexa. 🙂

[MarkR]

Getting a screenshot of a page is nontrivial. This is because, in practice you must invoke a browser to render it.

Getting the last updated time is easier, you can do a HTTP Request and look at the Last-Modified header. However, a lot of dynamically generated pages don't provide one.

Mark