You can now use date and time variables directly in your capture URLs. This lets you schedule captures of pages where the URL changes every day, hour, or minute – without creating a new capture each time.

How it works

When you create or edit a capture, you can include variables in the URL wrapped in angle brackets. At capture time, Blitapp replaces them with the current date and time in your timezone.

Available variables:

All date and time values use your account timezone, so a capture scheduled at 11pm in Los Angeles on April 2nd will use April 2nd, not April 3rd UTC.

Use cases

Daily comic strips and webcomics

Many webcomic sites use the date in their URL. Instead of manually updating the URL every day, set it once:

https://comicskingdom.com/popeye/<year>-<month>-<day>

Today this captures https://comicskingdom.com/popeye/2026-04-04. Tomorrow it automatically becomes https://comicskingdom.com/popeye/2026-04-05.

News archives and daily reports

Capture a daily report or archive page that rotates by date:

https://www.example.com/reports/<year>/<month>/<day>/summary

Financial and market data

Many financial sites organize data by date:

https://finance.example.com/market-close/<year>-<month>-<day>

Cache busting

If a site aggressively caches and you want to force a fresh load, add a random parameter:

https://www.example.com/dashboard?nocache=<timestamp>

Hourly monitoring

For pages that update throughout the day with time-based URLs:

https://status.example.com/hourly/<year>-<month>-<day>-<hour>

Works great with app variables

If you use Apps to upload your screenshots to cloud storage, you are probably already familiar with variables. Apps support variables in folder and file names to organize your captures automatically:

• <year>, <month>, <day>, <hour>, <minute> for date-based folders
• <domain>, <path>, <url> for URL-based names
• <capture_name>, <browser>, <country> for capture metadata
• <tags> for tag-based organization

For example, you could capture a daily comic page using URL variables:

URL: https://comicskingdom.com/popeye/<year>-<month>-<day>

And save it to your S3 bucket or Google Drive with app path variables:

Folder: comics/<year>/<month>
File: popeye-<year>-<month>-<day>.png

This gives you a fully automated pipeline: the right page is captured every day and stored in a neatly organized folder structure – all without any manual intervention.

Getting started

1. Go to your capture settings and enter a URL with variables
2. Use the Test button to verify the URL resolves correctly
3. Schedule your capture as usual

Variables work with single URLs, multiple URLs, and alongside all other capture settings like automation steps, login, and custom headers.