CFHTTP to save a .gif snapshot of webpage?

[flasheister]

I want to check URLs people enter in thier account automatically. So I want to
take the link, automatically go to each link and save a picture of the front
page (say the top 400x400 pixels) so I can come back later and review them to
be sure the website is active and has valid content.

Anyone have any good methods for doing this OR another way to automatically
check to see if a URL entered is a valid one with a working website?

[serat]

That's a bit of overkill, and you'd have to build an application to do that
since CFHTTP wont do all that for you.

It sounds like you just want to 1) validate the URL is good, and 2) check the
content for something that should be there, as a kind of positive control.

Use CFHTTP method=head to get just the headers to check for good status code
(200 OK).

Use CFHTTP method=get and then parse the CFHTTP filecontent for some keywords
that should appear for every request. If the keywords don't appear then the
content has changed.