Web whacking a site is rife with copyright violations, etc. However, some folks find it useful…for example, you want to show off a web site you’ve made to grandparents who lack Internet access (and don’t want it! ). In the past, I’ve recommended tools like SiteSnagger for Windows (which, BTW, Kathy Schrock recommended to me many years ago when I worked at an education service center) and SiteSucker for Mac.

A new approach I hadn’t heard of includes this one:

On linux I use wget, and I just googled and found that there are Windows binaries for it. It’s a command line app but very easy to use. To mirror a site, you’d just type

wget -mr http://site.com

The -m is for mirror and -r for recursive, meaning it’ll follow links on the site and download everything. If you google for “wget windows” you’ll be able to find the binaries.

Anyone have fresh suggestions? Some other ones that came up include:

1. ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and manage the collection. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are: Save Web page and Save Web site (In-depth Capture).
2. WebReaper: WebReaper is web crawler or spider, which can work its way through a website, downloading pages, pictures and objects that it finds so that they can be viewed locally, without needing to be connected to the internet.
3. WinHTTrack: It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online.

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