[thefreshteapot]

Wonderful article!

Could you tell us a little more about domshot.

I just the other day looked at phantomjs and ended up using casperjs on top as it allowed to use standard selectors to pick the elements I wanted to capture.

[pixelmonkey]

domshot is a Python API that lets you include JavaScript / CSS modules (e.g. jQuery, d3.js, your brand style). You then render PNGs using from Jinja2 templates. Under the hood, what it does is render static HTML from the Jinja2 template, open a PhantomJS headless browser instance on that page, and then render it into a PNG.

This way with a few lines of code, you can go from Jinja2 template -> rendered PNG without having to worry about the details of passing information back-and-forth between your Python app and a PhantomJS instance.

Sound interesting? We're planning on open sourcing it. Ping us (hello at parsely dot com) and we'll notify you of when it's available.

It would be open source already, but we're a bit backlogged on spare time projects at the moment. We just made an open source release of http://schema.to a couple weeks ago, and now Sandy struck so we find ourselves catching up. But, soon!