screenshot-grabbing email tool

Question

I have a web site with various graphs embedded in it that are generated externally. Occasionally those graphs will fail to generate and I would like to catch that when it happens. These graphs are embedded in multiple pages and I would rather not check each page manually. Is there any kind of tool or perhaps a browser addon that could periodically take screenshots of different URLs and email them in a single email? It would be sufficient to have scaled-down screenshots of full pages emailed maybe once a day to me, allowing me to take a quick glance and see that all the graphs are there and look okay.

Answer 1

I'm a big fan of automation. Rather than have emails generated that you then have to look at, take a look at 'replacing custom missing images in jquery'. This will run a piece of Javascript for each image that fails. Extending that to make a request to a URL that you control, which may also include the broken URL (or just the filename that is broken) would not be too hard. That URL would then generate an email, and store the broken URL so that it doesn't send 5000 emails if there's a flurry of hits to your page.

Another idea building on the above is to effectively change the external 404 from the source site to a local one (eg /backend/missing-images/) - the full-path need not exist - you are just generating a local 404 record in your apache logs. Logwatch will send a list of 404 pages from the apache log to you daily (or more often, if you want) by email.