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Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

geoscreenshot.com

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Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#11

Post by kpsychwave »

andrewl wrote: post #6

I like what you're offering, but I just get an "Encountered Problem" error in the latest version of Chrome on Windows 10. And I was testing a very minimal site with just the London location, so load should have been low. Load from my one test, that is. You may be getting a lot of other traffic. If it can be made to work reliably, I could see my company paying for it.

Hi Andrew,

There was a spike about 2 hours ago and the app exceeded an hourly quota. It should good to go now.

Please contact me at contact@geoscreenshot.com with your needs, I offer custom solutions for companies.

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#12

Post by kpsychwave »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #10
dbg31415 wrote: post #7

Cool idea. Your marketing site's pricing page breaks on mobile. Also seems like you could automate this and run the check every 5 minutes, and then compare the screenshots to see if any of them are different, then alert the users.

For what purpose? It should be easier/lighter to check if the HTML, CSS or JS has changed if you'd like to detect a defacement or a site load issue (actually, the HTTP status code would be different for one or more resources; 404, 500, etc)

Visual consistency checking is more comprehensive than source code diffs. For example, errors in third party services (a region-blocked ad, a youtube iframe, etc...) may not show up in error logs or HARs.

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#13

Post by kpsychwave »

If you got the "Encountered Problem" error, there was an unexpected spike and traffic a few hours ago, and the API was blocking requests. The server is back up now.

I would really appreciate it if you could send me any bugs, screenshots, suggestions to contact@geoscreenshot.com

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#15

Post by zeta0134 »

dbg31415 wrote: post #7

Cool idea. Your marketing site's pricing page breaks on mobile. Also seems like you could automate this and run the check every 5 minutes, and then compare the screenshots to see if any of them are different, then alert the users.

That sounds like a good idea on paper, but I think rotating or animating content (especially advertising banners) would heavily complicate that strategy.

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#16

Post by cmillard »

This looks similar to:

https://geopeeker.com/

I did a quick price/feature comparison and it appears to be a toss-up depending on what you need. Any thoughts on how you plan to distinguish yourself from this other service? Selecting your location is definitely a cool idea- good work!

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#17

Post by dbg31415 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #15
dbg31415 wrote: post #7

Cool idea. Your marketing site's pricing page breaks on mobile. Also seems like you could automate this and run the check every 5 minutes, and then compare the screenshots to see if any of them are different, then alert the users.

That sounds like a good idea on paper, but I think rotating or animating content (especially advertising banners) would heavily complicate that strategy.

Fair point.

I don't deal with a lot of sites that serve ads, but I do deal with a lot of sites that are on CDNs. Was more my target user group.

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#18

Post by kpsychwave »

zeta0134 wrote: post #15
dbg31415 wrote: post #7

Cool idea. Your marketing site's pricing page breaks on mobile. Also seems like you could automate this and run the check every 5 minutes, and then compare the screenshots to see if any of them are different, then alert the users.

That sounds like a good idea on paper, but I think rotating or animating content (especially advertising banners) would heavily complicate that strategy.

There are also pop ups (like the EU cookie warning), self-triggering modals, A/B testing experiences, and newer patterns like feedback widgets that give false positives.

I am working on a visual diff engine that will account for all of these, you can sign up for updates here:

http://geodiff.launchrock.com/

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#19

Post by kpsychwave »

cmillard wrote: post #16

This looks similar to: https://geopeeker.com/ I did a quick price/feature comparison and it appears to be a toss-up depending on what you need. Any thoughts on how you plan to distinguish yourself from this other service? Selecting your location is definitely a cool idea- good work!

We have more locations, a simpler product and more options for the advanced plan.

GeoScreenshot has a simpler and more intuitive UI so you can go back/forth between new captures and your history without having to reload pages.

Our pricing model is also simpler, we give you more locations and options for the plus plan. The free account with all the "plus" options enabled, so you know what you are paying for.

At the time of this writing, we offer 7 free locations and > 60 plus locations. For our advanced plan, you can select from > 420 cities from nearly every country in the world. We will set up a dedicated worker in that region.

Some examples of advanced locations:

https://www.geoscreenshot.com/country/united-states https://www.geoscreenshot.com/country/saudi-arabia https://www.geoscreenshot.com/country/china

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I would also like to add:

The main advantage of using GeoScreenshot over buying a proxy list or a VPN is convenience and efficiency. To minimize the headaches and man hours spent on website testing.

There are significant man hour costs and technical barriers with using VPNs/proxies, changing view ports, clearing cache, shifting browsers, system settings, locale settings, time zones.

Re: Show HN: GeoScreenshot – Test your website from many locations

#20

Post by josh_carterPDX »

We use Hotjar recordings to see what people see from various regions. It's pretty useful in that we can see how the page loads for users outside of the US. But beyond that, we can see what they interact with on the page.

This seems useful from a very high level, but if someone wants more data points I'm sure they would use something more robust.

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