Inspiration
The other day I had a client ask for a print out of the website, He was hoping to be able to mark stuff up by hand. As a sympathizer of old school paper and it’s merits I almost immediately said sure, not really sure what I was getting myself into.
A long story short after a good amount of searching for a tool to speed the process along, there isn’t a web service / program that will just turn a live website into a pdf. Well I guess that shouldn’t be too hard to make…
Hacking Time
PDFthisDomain is a very simple Sinatra app that has three components. A Sinatra app, a redis instance and a single worker. A user is first prompted to enter a URL which I quickly spider using anemone a sweet ruby web crawling gem. Once the spider is complete you see a list of urls that are available for rendering. Select which urls you want and enter a valid email, and off it goes to background processing. When the render is complete you should get a link to a zip file on S3 for you to download.
PS: Emails are only stored until
your job is complete. No worries 😉