I made a similar thing with phantomjs and node: http://node-urlshot.herokuapp.com/
Should be easy enough doing with phantom.js http://skookum.com/blog/dynamic-screenshots-on-the-server-wi...
This is nice, but I find webkit2png http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ (brew install webkit2png) a more simple and flexible way to quickly generate images (and thumbnails) of webpages.
This is nice, that it hosts them for you immediately, although dropbox live links are pretty easy.
pici.picidae.net - http://pici.picidae.net/CACHE/dec45eca572ebdea3a554c5827d33d...
html2image - http://s3.amazonaws.com/amazon-cl2/LXOTY9N1IMC4BJ3GZU1PCZTNL...
Works well on the desktop but I couldn't get it to work on my iPhone and the UI was completely broken when I tried to load the page.
If you need to host your own screenshot/html2png app, I've built this on top of PhantomJS: https://github.com/w3p/htmlshots. It uses PhantomJS's builtin webserver module to serve screenshots, so you don't need to spawn a new process for each screenshot request.
I entered http://www.tumblr.com and it took around 5 seconds to come up with a result, this is because tumblr uses "endless scrolling".
Is this by design?
As others mentioned - PhantomJS is way to go, it supports webfonts as well - http://www.grab.lv/_external/testpreview.png
Wow. At last, an azure-hosted site featured on HN front page.
I've always done this kind of stuff with PhantomJS; but I find this much better (no need to copy and paste code for a quick 1-minute job).
Doesn't phantomjs do the thing for you?
haha i see waht you did there. this is the king of all craigslist posting - image based ads
Well, nice, really nice idea. Tried it and was frustrated by the poor quality, of the screenshot it produced. Grainy and blurred fonts, nothing I would wanna use.
And the software had obvious problems parsing my css-styles. Some headlines were way of...
Hope you might be able to fix these issues. If not, you are (at least in my case) not usable...