[lizardgator]

I have a question about the best way of saving web pages from a web site that is going to be taken down by it's owner in a few weeks. If I save the pages to my hard drive when the site is removed, will I still be able to view the pages I saved? Is there a particular format I need to save it in to or does it not matter. It has archived pages I would like to save so I want to make sure I do it correctly, thanks for your help.

[turtle777]

There are several ways.

a) Safari - File - Save as... - Web Archive
b) "print" PDFs
c) Use Evernote - it creates a button in Safari and copies the visible page into Evernote, fully indexed
d) Use special apps like Blue Crab or WebGrabber.

I'm sure there are other specialized software packages that basically "suck" the whole website to your HD. Google is your friend.

-t

[Gavin]

wget is a command line program you run in the terminal - it's not hard to use. it can download every page in a website and rewrite the links as local links, so your browser doesn't go out looking on the net.

get it here
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31606

or by way of macports or fink

after you install it, type this stuff into the terminal. one line at a time, hit return after each one. replace example.com with the domain of your site:

mkdir mysite

cd mysite

wget -r --convert-links -D example.com -p http://www.example.com

what it does:
1. make a folder
2. change into the folder
3. download the site into that folder while fixing the links for local use

remember: interactive content will not work - message boards, etc. Javascripts on the site may break.

have fun

[Hal Itosis]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Safari - File - Save as... - Web Archive

MS Internet Explorer used to do this perfectly... what, a decade ago? IE also had options for how deep to dig, excluding pages on other sites, etc.

Safari only does one page at a time... and if we grab several pages, they won't "link" to each for offline viewing. In fact, Safari sometimes has trouble displaying images for .webarchive files it downloaded several months back.

iCab does pretty well, and saves its results to a viewable "zip" file (viewable in iCab at any rate). The zip format is smaller than Safari's .webarchive version, and... we can expand the zip to get all the html and graphic files, if desired!

[turtle777]

You are right, Safari's Webarchive is a very rudimentary implementation, and not a good archiving option.

-t

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

MS Internet Explorer used to do this perfectly... what, a decade ago? IE also had options for how deep to dig, excluding pages on other sites, etc.

Safari only does one page at a time... and if we grab several pages, they won't "link" to each for offline viewing. In fact, Safari sometimes has trouble displaying images for .webarchive files it downloaded several months back.

iCab does pretty well, and saves its results to a viewable "zip" file (viewable in iCab at any rate). The zip format is smaller than Safari's .webarchive version, and... we can expand the zip to get all the html and graphic files, if desired!

If I don't recall wrong Microsoft had got that technology from the CAB Amiga browser, which was made by the guy behind iCab, which had a couple of nifty apps to deal with IE web archives under old Mac OS.

Anyhow, iCab has to be the most underrated Mac browser.