Making screenshot of the website with changes made by user - php

Is it possible to take a screenshot of the visible part of the website directly as it is seen by user (rendered by by the browser), including any changes made by user (e.g. moved divs, text typed in forms etc.)?
So you open a website, where you can make changes to its content. And there's a button (on the website of course), when you click it, the actual visible part of the website with all the changes you made is saved as an image and for example there goes a popup window where you can type in an email to send this image to, or something like that. Javascript, php, html5 or anything else? Old browsers and ie doesn't matter.
I've searched a lot for the answer, read lots of related articles, but I couldn't find the solution, cause what I need is not the script that would re-render the page like html2canvas, but capture the actual content displayed on the screen.
Any ideas and comments are much appreciated!

This is something that can be extremely tricky.
Essentially your only option of doing this in browser with no extensions or such is to try rendering HTML into the <canvas> tag.
There are several projects which do that, most reliable choices are noted in this SO question's answers: Render HTML in Canvas/WebGL
Note that none of the projects are 100% accurate, but a canvas can be rendered into an image and thus could be saved or emailed by the user like you asked.

Related

Elements unintentionally resize on side refresh

I have a jQuery Mobile application, and on certain pages, such as for example this one: "http://olkensway.se/upplevdinkommun/activities.php?community_id=6&category_id=1", I'm facing a problem. When the page is loaded the first time, it shows correctly, but the problem occurs when I refresh the page (by pressing F5). Try and see for yourselves. The search field re-sizes and becomes much larger than what is supposed to be. This problem occurs both in my desktop browser (Tested with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer) and my mobile browser (Google Chrome as well). Using Google, I haven't found anybody with the same problem yet. I'm new to both jQueryMobile and web design in general. Is this a problem with my PHP, HTML or CSS. Some conflict with jQM? Please tell if I should show more code than what is available by viewing the page's source.
EDIT: It can be worth telling that I have other pages, not using any PHP, where this isn't a problem. So it's likely come conflict there...
When I load the page, the search thing is taking up the entire page. After inspecting the element in chrome, the article element's font size is 200% (.ui-body-c) . When I unchecked that it went to a "normal" size. I'm not sure exactly what you want it to look like, but maybe that's your problem? hopefully that helps

Using PHP or JavaScript (client side) - How to inject a web element into a live webpage (for a demo..)?

Let's say, that I want to demonstrate a widget (or some HTML in a frame) that would be "injected" into another page.
For example: I want to show the people in Amazon.com that I can put let's say a ball image underneath every price tag they put on their web page. That is - I want to build a web server (or indeed a server less html web page) that would show their page and put some stuff of mine inside theirs. So it looks as if the client (Amazon.com here) has my software already installed on their server.
I am a web-dev total newbie, so if this is the simplest thing in the world please, ..
Thanks
There's TONS of special cases that can cause this to fail, but I'll present a simple way that will work for you on a decent amount of webpages(but not all).
save the webpages html source into a local html file.
edit the html source, adding a <base href="http://www.amazon.com/"> tag into the <head> element.
make any other modifcations to the page you want, such as adding new <script> tags to support your new functionality. Make sure your modifications use absolute urls.
If they navigate away from the page, your enhancements will obviously not carry onto the next page. ALso, you will have more success if you upload the file onto a web server. While a user can view the page by double clicking on the html file if they were to save it locally, differences in javascript security permissions will likely make some webpages not function correctly.
The reason you need to add the <base> tag is because the browser resolves relative urls by looking at the url in its address bar. So, if the amazon page had an image like this
<img src="logo.png">
and you saved the html and put it on you webserver at www.example.com, the browser would look for the image at www.example.com/logo.png, which clearly doesn't exist. The base tag tells it what base url to use.
If you need more automation, having them install a browser addon would be a good way to do this if your users are somewhat technical. Greasemonkey is a popular addon, and you can tell it to inject stuff into certain webpages. The benefit of an addon is that it can inject the new functionality into any page on the web, without you having to individually save and modify them. Also, it has the potential to work on all web pages, leaving their functionality perfectly in tact, opposed to the other suggestion. This is far more complicated though.

Dynamic "screenshots" for demonstrations in help page

I'd like to improve the "help" page of my website by adding screenshots of various sections of the site. I'm hesitant to make these static images since the site is still in development and is cosmetically changing constantly. In fact, I'm even thinking that creating images at all may be overkill.
Is it possible to load (via PHP or JQuery) a small section (with static size and x y) of another page and display it in a div?
We're doing a thing like that in our Help section, but I think that dynamically loading live screenshots is a waiste of resources.
Actually, we're doing this in our build process, just after our tests. A headless browser (selenium under xvfb) is used to take a full screen screenshot of our different pages, on our pre-deployed application.
Then, we a modification occured, the build process take care of including the modifications...
Load the Page you want the "screenshot" of into an <iframe> with the desired size and use an anchor or http://api.jquery.com/scroll/ to move the contents to the position, you want to show.
if you don't want the user to scroll away or interact with the iframe, just put a transparent layer over it.
It is also very helpful to make a GIF of the screen to show the user how to do something fast, instead of written explanations, so if there are cosmetics changes, the user can continue seeing how to do something, you can create the Screen recording GIFs with http://www.getcloudapp.com

Dynamic web-page interface with persistent client changes

I am trying to create a web page with a tab menu. I want to be able to dynamically add and delete tabs (and other content). There is a perfect example of what I want here: http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichScript=tab-view . I want the newly created tabs to be persistent through page loads. So basically if I add a tab and refresh I want the tab to still be there. If I close the browser and reload the page a month later I would like the tab and any content to still be there. This page is for personal use and will be hosted on my computer and accessed through the browser alone, not any kind of web server. Although I'm not against using a web server if I need to.
Looking at the code it seems that the 'add tab' functions just add HTML to the page in memory but I need it to permanently change the HTML of the page. Is there a way to write dynamic changes to the DOM back to disk? I'm not quite sure where to go with this and searching for a week has left me with too many language and implementation options to look into. I am not an experienced web developer and there is so many different ways to create web pages and so many new terms that I'm a little overloaded now.
I do realize that this is a little outside the realm of a typical web-site. It is generally not a good idea to let the client-side make changes to data on the server-side. But since I am the only person who will be using this and it will not be accessible from the internet security is not an issue.
I'm not apposed to any particular scripting language, but I would like to keep it as simple as possible. I.e.: one HTML page, one CSS, and maybe a script file. Whatever is necessary. I am not apposed to reading and learning on my own either so being pointed down the right path is fine for me.
If you need a rock solid method, then you would need some record of having those tabs existing. That means having a database that knows that the tab exists, which tab it was, and what content it contained. Html5's local browser storage (not to be confused with cookies though) could also be a viable solution but browser compatibility is an issue (for now).
You also need some sort of "user accounts system" so you know who among your users had this set of tabs open. Otherwise, if you had a single "tabs list" for everyone, everyone would open the same tabs!
For dynamic html and js for the "tab adding", you are on the right spot. You need PHP to interact with the database that is MySQL. What PHP does it it recieves data in the server from the browser about what happened like:
know which user is logged in
what action did he choose (add or remove tab)
add to the database or delete a record
reply with a success or error, whichever happened
For MySQL, you need to create a database with a table for your "tab list". This list must have:
User id (to know which user did what among the ones in the list)
Tab id (know which tab is which among the ones in the list)
Tab content (it may be a link for an iframe, actual html, text etc.)
Friend, when you talk of closing the browser and not losing the data, then you are talking about data persistence or data durability. In other words, you have to save your data somewhere, and load it next time.
For storage you can use a flat file (a simple text file), a database, an XML file, etc. However, you need to learn a lot to save the information and content of the new tab somewhere, and next time load it.

Opening Javascript based popup ads on the same page

I own an image hosting site and would like to generate one popup per visitor per day. The easiest way for me to do this was to write a php script that called subdomains, like ads1.sitename.com
ads2.sitename.com
unfortunatly most of my advertisers want to give me a block of javascript code to use rather than a direct link, so I can't just make the individual subdomains header redirects.I'd rather use the subdomains that way I can manage multiple advertisers without changing any code on page, just code in my php admin page. Any ideas on how I can stick this jscript into the page so I don't need to worry about a blank ads1.sitename.com as well as the popup coming up?
I doubt you'll find much sympathy for help with pop-up ads.
How about appending a simple window.close() after the advertising code? That way their popup is displayed and your window closes neatly.
I'm not sure that I've ever had a browser complain that the window is being closed. This method has always worked for me. (IE, Firefox, etc.)
At the risk of helping someone who wants to deploy popup ads (which is bound to fail due to most popup blockers anyway), why can't you just have the subdomains load pages that load the block of Javascript the advertisers give you?
Hey, cut the guy some slack. Popups might not be very nice, but at least he's trying to reduce the amount of them. And popup blockers are going to fix most of it anyway. In any case, someone else might find this question with more altruistic goals (not sure how they'd fit that with popups, but hey-ho).
I don't quite follow your question, but here's some ideas:
Look into Server Side Includes (SSI) to easily add a block of javascript to each page (though you could also do it with a PHP include instead)
Do your advertiser choosing in your PHP script rather than calling the subdomains
Decipher the javascript to work out what it's doing and put a modified version in the subdomain page so it doesn't need an additional popup. Shouldn't be too hard.

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