I didn't realise it had been so long but in February 2010 I wrote a little blog post about creating screenshots of websites automatically.
I wrote this after finding that the team at WordPress had created their own system for doing this - and so I created a super simple plugin that let's you use this functionality in your blog. I'm not sure why but I never added the plugin to the WordPress plugin repository.
Last week Kevin Leary decided this wasn't a good thing so he sent me a tweet or two and added the plugin on to WordPress.org - improving it in the process. Kevin added the shortcode to Tinymce (the post editor) so that you can even more easily add the automatic screenshots to your blog posts.
You can download the Browser Shots plugin on WordPress.org now.
So - I am going to change all of the links here on Binary Moon so that the bm-shots plugin points to the Browser Shots plugin on WordPress.org. If you're using BM Shots then you should definitely update to this new version. Kevin added me as a developer to the app so it's possible that I will be working on it more in the future (if I have any ideas 
).
Talking of ideas - if anyone has any ideas or thoughts on what could be done with the Browser Shots WordPress Plugin then please do add these comments or suggestions below and if I think they are any good then perhaps I will look into adding them.
Thanks for the write-up Ben, the entire plugin wouldn't have been possible without your original article covering Automattic's use of mshots.
November 2, 2012
I am an amateur with some knowledge but I cannot figure out how to use your browser shot plug in and have the screen shots presented side by side horizontally on my page - they seem to land i a vertical row ... Could you give me some advice! MANY THANKS!
Inger
April 14, 2013
Hello and thank you for the nice plugin. I wonder if you know how frequently the cache of screenshots are refreshed? Does WP store the URL screenshots as they are--with no update--or, do they reload after a certain amount of time?
December 3, 2012
I don't know exactly what the frequency is but it seems to be roughly 24 - 48 hours.
December 3, 2012