gleemo

Designers save a lot of references, but bookmarks are poor at preserving why a page mattered in the first place. You remember the layout or interaction, not just the URL.

I built Gleemo as a design-reference tool that crawls websites, captures screenshots, stores historical versions, and lets users group them into collections.

live project

• Gleemo - Design inspiration tool

how it works

Gleemo is built around three entities:

1. Pages for the tracked URLs
2. Versions for the captured visual history of each page
3. Collections for grouping references by theme or project

The workflow is simple: paste a URL, let the system crawl and render it, store a screenshot, and create a new version whenever the page changes later.

That makes the tool more useful than a bookmark manager because the visual state is preserved.

architecture

The project uses:

• Angular on the frontend
• Firestore for pages, versions, and collections
• Firebase Authentication for accounts
• Firebase Cloud Functions for crawling and screenshot generation

The backend jobs fetch the page, render it in headless Chrome, capture the screenshot, generate thumbnails, and store metadata in Firestore.

The gallery uses lazy loading and filtering so large collections stay usable.

what was tricky

The hard parts were mostly operational:

1. screenshot consistency across different sites
2. memory limits inside Cloud Functions
3. deciding when a change was significant enough to count as a new version
4. handling products that live on multiple subdomains

It was also a good reminder that niche tools work best when they match a real workflow. Gleemo was not trying to be a general inspiration app. It was for people who specifically wanted visual references for web products and wanted to track how those products changed over time.