As you may have noticed, there has been a link to "Design Daily" in my sidebar for a week or two. "What the hell is that?" you may ask yourself. Well, I'm about to tell you.

When I got my new iMac, I was looking for something to keep my mini busy... to pass the time. At around the same time, I discovered this cool little python script called webkit2png, which uses the webkit rendering engine to take damn good screenshots of webpages, rendered correctly... which seems to be a problem w/ some other screencap services. So I wrote a ruby script to slurp links from a number of design-related feeds, and sic webkit2png on the links. It then uploads them to my web server, and voila! Screencaps of designy sites. Sometimes visually browsing design sites is more useful than text links when you're just looking for a little eye-candy. Inspiration. There is also an RSS feed for the screencaps, if you like to take it that way.

One interesting side-effect of the script is that, since it loads the entire page before taking the screencap, it also loads audio files. Every once in a while my mini will start playing a site's soundtrack for about 30 seconds out of nowhere.