Chrome

In the last article in this series I looked at creating a link directory on a Drupal site. In that article I looked at how I set up the links and took screenshots of the sites using a headless Chromium browser as the links were added.

The issue I had was that when I used headless Chromium to take screenshots of the sites the success rate was not very high. In these days of AI attacks, site captcha checks, and cookie popups it turned out to be quite difficult to take a clean screenshot of a site without being blocked either by a CDN or a cookie popup. In fact, most of the time the screenshot would be just a CDN error page.

I therefore looked for a different mechanism. Since I wanted to take a screenshot of a website it made sense to me to use a browser to do this, and because I am already using a browser why not get the browser I'm using to take the screenshot. After a bit of research I realised that creating browser plugins to do this was actually pretty simple. Plus once the screenshot has been taken I can post this to the Drupal site using a REST resource.

A problem I've been struggling with for a while now is managing my bookmarks. Every time I come across an interesting article I want to read, a good resource I want to keep, or a neat tool I want to try I create a bookmark.

Over time I have collected a large collection of bookmarks so when I add a new one to the list it gets lots in the pile. I've tried to create directories to keep "new" bookmarks or organise them into sections, but I always end up scrabbling to find them.

The problem is that web browsers don't allow you to categorise or search bookmarks so I can never find them again. Also when I swap browsers (which I have done twice this year) I end up having to migrate them over and set up synchronising between computers. This always removes the favicons of the sites so I have even more trouble finding the right link.

Generating a PDF document from a web page through PHP can be problematic. It's often something that seems quite simple, but actually generating the document can be difficult and time consuming.

There are a number of libraries available that allow you to generate PDF documents, but in reality they solve one problem and introduce several more. Packages exist as either HTML to PDF converters or allow you to generate a PDF by placing elements into the document.

Generating a PDF manually is not normally a good way to go just due to it being a very time consuming process and is difficult to test. You will probably have to spend time creating a rendering engine just for this purpose, and that will take time to create and maintain.