Category: General

General articles about geographic testing

We are shutting down! :(

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Dear GeoScreenshot Users,

I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to you today with mixed emotions as I have an important announcement to make regarding GeoScreenshot. After careful consideration and deliberation, I have come to the difficult decision to shut down the GeoScreenshot service. This is not a decision I take lightly, and I want to explain the reasons behind it.

First and foremost, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of you who have been loyal users of GeoScreenshot. Your support, feedback, and trust have been instrumental in shaping GeoScreenshot into what it is today. It has been a remarkable journey, and I am genuinely thankful for your continued support.

The decision to terminate the service was not made in haste but rather as a result of several factors that have made it necessary. Over the years, the landscape of online services and technology has evolved significantly. While we have strived to provide a reliable and valuable service, we have encountered challenges that have made it increasingly difficult to maintain the quality and performance our users deserve.

As a result, we have reached a point where it is no longer feasible to continue operating GeoScreenshot at the level of excellence we aspire to deliver. It is essential to me that we maintain the integrity of our service and not compromise on its reliability or security.

Therefore, with a heavy heart, I must inform you that all subscriptions to GeoScreenshot will be cancelled, and the service will be discontinued in 30 days from the date of this announcement. We will begin the process of refunding any active subscriptions accordingly.

I understand that this news may come as a disappointment, and I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience it may cause. Please know that this decision was made with the long-term best interests of our users in mind.

I want to once again express my gratitude for your support and trust in GeoScreenshot. It has been an honor to serve you, and I hope that our paths may cross again in the future in different endeavors.

If you have any questions or require assistance during this transition period, please do not hesitate to contact our support team at [email protected]. We will do our utmost to ensure a smooth and seamless process for you.

Thank you for being a part of the GeoScreenshot community. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Eyasu Kifle

Founder, GeoScreenshot

Take Zapier webpage screenshots from many locations

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You can now integrate Geo with your tools directly using Zapier. In this tutorial, we’ll create a Zap that captures Bing News daily from Japan and sends an email with a screenshot.

1. Grab an API Key

You can find the API keys in the My Account section
  1. Sign up for the advanced plan, and go to the API section of My Account: https://www.geoscreenshot.com/userarea/account/api
  2. Create a new API key for Zapier. The API key will be shown in the list titled “Existing Keys”. You can hover over the blurred box to reveal the content.
  3. Save the API key in a safe location. You will use this key to authenticate with Zapier.

2. Connect with Zapier

Use the invitation link to sign up for the Zap.

This invite link will take you to the GeoScreenshot integration

Sign up for Zapier or sign in with your existing account. You will see a screen to accept an invitation:

Accept the invitation by clicking “Accept invite and build a zap”

3. Create a new Zap – Authenticate

You can use any app that generates events as a trigger for screenshots. For this example, we will use Zapier’s built-in Schedule app.

Configure the triggering event by modifying the settings of the zap

Search for GeoScreenshot and select the app

You should see GeoScreenshot in the search results

Click on Sign in with GeoScreenshot

It will open a modal that will ask you for the API Key from Step 1

Fill your API key and click Continue

You should see your email and plan under account

You have now linked Zapier with your Geo account!

4. Create a new Zap – Screenshot

Once you click Continue, it will take you to the capture setting screen.

The options shown here mirror what is available in the Capture user interface at geoscreenshot.com

Run a test capture once you’ve configured your capture

You will get a JSON response with all of the output. https://api.geoscreenshot.com/

Send an email with the capture results

The Email app by Zapier provides an easy way to send email reports

Enrich the body of the email with capture data

You can refer to any field in the JSON response in the body and/or subject of the email
Send a test email and turn on Zap

3. Get a daily email with the screenshot

How to capture your website on a regular interval

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We’re proud to announce the release of scheduled captures on GeoScreenshot. You are now able to schedule your captures to run in the background on a daily, weekly or monthly interval and archive your results for future viewing.

Our customers requested this feature to help them track the consistency of their captures over a long period of time. You can also use this feature to maintain an archive of website changes from various locations and configurations.

We’ve released it to all subscribers of our monthly plans. You can schedule as many screenshots as the maximum allows.

To get started,

1. Capture your URL

Go to the capture page and capture your desired URL as you normally would. Feel free to fine tune your capture settings according to your needs.

Capturing www.office.com from 50 locations. The captures are displayed grouped by country.

2. Convert your recent capture to a scheduled job

Once your capture is done, you can click on the Schedule Job button to convert your capture into a job. Give it a descriptive job title, and proceed in the dialog. Your capture settings from your capture (in the example, www.office.com) will be automatically carried to the second step of the flow.

You can click on the schedule button to convert your existing job into a recurrent capture. Your settings for the capture will be automatically persisted.

3. Customize your capture schedule

On step 3, you can choose to run your capture daily, weekly or monthly. You can further customize the schedule by customizing it further by setting the day of week, hour, time zone and limiting the maximum number of runs. In addition, you can choose to limit all jobs to a time window.

You can expand the Advanced Options section to fine tune the capture schedule to meet your needs.

4. Confirm your final schedule

As a final check, you can preview a forecast of the run times and get an estimate for monthly credit reservations. When your job is active, it will reserve the necessary number of credits from your prepaid and subscription pool. Once you deactivate your job, any unused credits will be refunded to your subscription credits.

Click Save Job when you are done.

You can make changes to your schedule and click Preview to see how it will affect the actual dates and monthly credit costs

5. You are set!

Once you have configured your jobs, you can click on the schedule tab to see a dashboard of your upcoming runs.

You will get a comprehensive report of your latest runs from all your scheduled jobs on this screen.

6. Give us feedback

Email [email protected] with any questions or feedback. We’d love to hear your suggestions for improvement.

GeoScreenshot API Beta

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We’ve released an early version of the GeoScreenshot 2 API for our advanced plan users. Here is a brief tutorial on how to get started.

Step 1. Generate an API Key

Your API key is private and should not be shared with another person. If you need to create multiple API keys for different applications or users on your team, Geo allows you to create multiple keys and manage them individually.

Navigate to My Account:

https://www.geoscreenshot.com/userarea/account/api

Step 2. Make a request to the screenshot endpoint with your API key

URL: https://api.geoscreenshot.com/screenshot?

Query String Params:

  • apikey – Api key from dashboard
  • url – A valid HTTP/S URL
  • country – Alpha 2 country code (Required)

Advanced capture settings

  • user_agent – 1 or 0, User agent string override (Optional , defaults to Google Chrome)
  • full_page – 1 or 0, Capture the full height of the page (Optional , defaults to 0)
  • local_tz – 1 or 0, Use local timezone (Optional , defaults to 1)
  • local_html5_geolocation – 1 or 0, Use local HTML5 geolocation (Optional , defaults to 1)
  • width – Viewport width (Optional, defaults to 1280px)
  • height – Viewport height (Optional, defaults to 1024px)

Advanced location settings

Sample Response:

"_meta": {
        "uid": "fabd8fa3-c4aa-4a0f-9894-a3580b31ec74",
        "startTime": 1591611008242,
        "endTime": 1591611020878,
        "duration": 12636,
        "instanceId": "516e8d0cbddbf6b25f4d0218f87336ec_0"
    },
    "_hash": {
        "perceptual": "b00c07ef7cf7b001f0c7f0417071f07330f17bf1f00731c1fff03000f040f3f3",
        "html": "15e0cdc83fe612e296339b958f9d6934c8d056908a5b47f31f92bce740e60843",
        "png": "9a93408fe05bc13d71db4220039a5f3454de19a1078f5bbc2825fc5391ead329",
        "console": "83f976263ba5eece3baa5ec655439f41257dd62f1d55dfd66b98d08eac97345b",
        "har": "14d08a710f8d35fb498c218d959841dcdfa835ff92ef3a8dd1ed7f3e84590f53",
        "cookies": "b13ab3f6a59045b8ca7031e0032618280b3d49749902d1f255a1d0c5ce9de066"
    },
    "errors": {
        "html": null,
        "png": null,
        "navigate": null
    },
    "png": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoscreenshot-static/fabd8fa3-c4aa-4a0f-9894-a3580b31ec74.png",
    "html": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoscreenshot-static/fabd8fa3-c4aa-4a0f-9894-a3580b31ec74.html",
    "console": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoscreenshot-static/fabd8fa3-c4aa-4a0f-9894-a3580b31ec74.console.json",
    "har": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoscreenshot-static/fabd8fa3-c4aa-4a0f-9894-a3580b31ec74.har.json",
    "metrics": {
        "dnsLookup": 0,
        "tcpConnect": 0,
        "request": 175,
        "response": 917,
        "domLoaded": 3859,
        "domInteractive": 1910,
        "pageLoad": 1,
        "fullTime": 4821
    },
    "cookies": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoscreenshot-static/fabd8fa3-c4aa-4a0f-9894-a3580b31ec74.cookies.json",
    "ip": "69.197.157.130",
    "title": "Google News",
    "capture_id": "148936",
    "domain": "news.google.com",
    "url": "https://news.google.com",
    "metro_id": "us_mss_knsscty",
    "node_id": "us_mss_kns_1luhIL",
    "options": "{}",
    "created_at": "2020-06-08T10:10:21.000Z",
    "updated_at": "2020-06-08T10:10:21.000Z"
}

Step 3. Parse the JSON

  • _meta – Metadata about the capture request lifecycle
  • _hash – Hashes of the data returned, including a perceptual hash for similarity indexing
  • errors – Any errors encountered during capture
  • png – URL to the PNG
  • html – URL to the rendered HTML
  • console – A JSON of any console messages encountered
  • har – HTTP archive waterfall of the requests
  • metrics – Page load performance metrics
  • cookies – Cookie jar JSON
  • ip – The public IP used
  • title – The webpage’s final title at the time of the capture
  • capture_id – Internal id used for future reference
  • domain – The parsed domain of the URL, used for blacklisting adult sties
  • url – The requested URL
  • metro_id – The precise metropolitan area used. You can pass this instead of country to get consistent geo-ip targeting.
  • node_id – The precise VPS node used to run the capture. You can pass this instead of metro_id to re-use the same IP multiple times

Shortcut Endpoints

For PNG: https://api.geoscreenshot.com/screenshot/png?apikey=<API_KEY>&url=https://news.ycombinator.com&country=de

For HTML: https://api.geoscreenshot.com/screenshot/html?apikey=<API_KEY>&url=https://news.ycombinator.com&country=de&no_precheck

For HAR: https://api.geoscreenshot.com/screenshot/har?apikey=<API_KEY>&url=https://news.ycombinator.com&country=de&no_precheck

For Console Output: https://api.geoscreenshot.com/screenshot/har?apikey=<API_KEY>&url=https://news.ycombinator.com&country=de&no_precheck

Testing HTML5 geo-location at scale – Store locator example

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If you want to get very precise geolocation information about your website’s visitors, the HTML5 Geolocation API is a very reliable method for fetching real-time location information. Most browsers support the JavaScript API and there are many tools for implementing it.

Many sites use the Geolocation API to fetch the user’s information. For example, McDonalds.com prompts the user for permission to access the browser’s API. Without explicit permissions, it will show an input box for a user’s address.

Other sites like Starbucks.com use a hybrid approach of GeoIP and HTML5 geo-location. By using GeoIP as the default provider, they pre-populate their list with relevant store information and improve the precision of the targeting once the user grants privileges.

Example:

Once granted, it will show a populated results page with the nearest locations.

Starbucks.com
For a tutorial on how to implement HTML5 geo-location, please go here.

Testing HTML5 Geo-location – Starbucks Store Locator

  1. Log in to your GeoScreenshot account

https://www.geoscreenshot.com/login

2. Go to the capture page, enter the URL, make sure “HTML5 Geolocation” is enabled

3. You should see a grid of results

4. Click on a specific screenshot to look at the details

Screenshot

Announcing GeoScreenshot 2!

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The newest incarnation of GeoScreenshot is now available – just as with version 1, it allows you to conveniently and efficiently view your webpage live from hundreds of locations around the world, but now includes a number of exciting new features:

  • An improved, more intuitive user interface
  • Additional locations
  • Incorporation of the Google Chrome engine
  • Enhanced debugging
  • An improved billing dashboard
GeoScreenshot screen capture

These enhancements have made GeoScreenshot better than ever, and we’re working on additional features, as well, including HAR support, scheduled captures, and live, interactive browsing.

GeoScreenshot can be utilized in a number of situations:

  • Does your website feature geo-targeted content? GeoScreenshot can help to ensure that the right content is being displayed in the right location
  • Web censorship is an issue in many countries around the world – GeoScreenshot can be used to check where your site or its components may be blocked
  • Is your site multi-lingual? Use GeoScreenshot to make sure HTTP accept headers and respects are being honored
  • GeoScreenshot can also be used to see where your website ranks on Google or other search engines in various locations

If you need to view your website from multiple locations for whatever reason, GeoScreenshot is the tool for you!

Want to take GeoScreenshot on a test drive before you buy? You can sign up and get 20 captures for free – no credit card required!

Once you’re ready to purchase a plan, we offer three affordable options:

  • Prepaid – pay just $0.08 per capture
  • Basic – pay $19/mo on the monthly plan, or $192/yr on the annual plan (a savings of $36)
  • Advanced – pay $49/mo on the monthly plan, or $468/yr on the annual plan (a savings of $120)

More details on Pricing here: https://www.geoscreenshot.com/pricing

We also offer a customized Enterprise plan for those that need API integration, team pricing or other advanced features.

If you have any questions or need more information, simply email us at [email protected].

Enjoy the new and improved GeoScreenshot!

How Do I Localize My Website?

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If your website has a global audience, localization is an important element of success. It’s not just about translating the language. It’s about ensuring that the site is ready to inspire targeted users to take the desired action – to buy, join, subscribe, share and visit again. It’s about making sure every element of the site takes into consideration a user’s language, perspective, behavior and cultural norms. In order to do that, the site needs to be evaluated from various cultural perspectives. And you should expect that to lead to a redevelopment of content and branding if you truly want to resonate with international audiences.

Automatic language translation can cause issues with tone, clarity and grammar. But even if a website was translated by the most qualified professional linguist, the site may still fall short of important nuances that create a positive and comfortable experience. Consider design elements such as colors, sizes, and shapes; cultural content involving humor, etiquette, symbols and beliefs; and functional content such as date and time formats, contact information, and reviews.

Some localization experts not only adapt web content to cater to national or regional market preferences, but may also recreate or “transcreate” advertising and marketing campaign messaging to maximize cultural appeal—and avoid potentially embarrassing or offensive communications.

Source: http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/06/22/translation-versus-localization/

Use Location Data

Don’t exhaust yourself conforming your site to every possible culture. Google Analytics or Alexa will help you determine which countries generate the majority of your visits. And once you’ve decided on some geographic targets, be deliberate! Geographic information will help you make smarter decisions about targeting and messaging, and it will increase the value of your advertising inventory. Businesses with tighter budgets will appreciate a tighter geographic focus.

Just watch the traffic and conversions grow!

Do Some Research

Get in touch with some agencies in the local region that can help you understand the market. Make sure that the products or services would be in demand there, and that they will integrate well with the values of the target audience. Know how their customs and practices differ from ours. The last thing you want to do is offend an audience you want to capture.

Keep Updating

Think of each version of your site as a living entity. You want it to continue to develop and improve as time goes by. As you add content, products, promotions, and functionality to the original site, you should plan to do the same to the other versions each and every time there is a change. The users will feel their importance and your commitment.

Make Sure It’s Working

If something isn’t displaying correctly, be sure to fix it fast. Always have skilled translators available to help you update content. Geoblocking and censorship will be an issue in some countries. Make sure you know if your site is up and how it looks and functions from every targeted location. GeoScreenshot allows you to test your website from over 50 geolocations.

Just like concerned parents and website owners can control content, some foreign governments choose to limit what can be viewed in their countries. Are the laws of certain countries affecting the visibility of your website there? You bet. If you have a global target audience, you should find out if your website or any of its content is being blocked in certain markets.