Tech Question: How to save website pages

[abbey_kyle]

I am rounding out the last chapter in my dissertation and am at a stopping point. Does anyone know how to save ALL the files from a website so that I may work offline?

I have five websites I am referencing in my dissertation and will be using them for analysis. I am heading out of town next week, however, and won't always have access to the net. I don't need to get in and rework or access the pages, just see them...I know I can save each page as a .pdf but some of these sites have so many pages, it would take me forever to do it that way.

I am on a Mac but can figure it out if you offer me suggestions on a PC. The browsers I use are Firefox and Safari.

any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[akatrex]

To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a file on your desktop.

To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program.

To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)

To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)

Add Control to the two shortcuts above to place the screen shot on the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop.

 

[abbey_kyle]

thanks akatrex, but this would require me to open each page in the site--this is how I did it last time. It took forever! Isn't there a way to save files of the whole site without opening each and every page?

some of these websites are health-related advice sites so they are filled with small pages of hypertext. I am trying to find a way around each page being opened.

thanks for the suggestion, though!

 

[Noira]

Nope.

I know that in Internet Explorer you can go into the File menu and save webpage as... same with Firefox... save page as... and this is the only way you can do it. Page by page, saving each page.

I'm not sure if you could do some sort of 'work offline' thing and then... yeah, I don't know. You'd have to contact the webmasters, really. But this is easier than screenshotting. Since you can save them neatly into one folder and it'll make them all into folders themselves, you'll be able to view each page as it is digitally by opening the saved .html file.

 

[Weird Harold]

I have five websites I am referencing in my dissertation and will be using them for analysis. I am heading out of town next week, however, and won't always have access to the net.

Look in the help file for your browser for "make available offline" and/or "Synchronizing Favorites."

In IE, when you click on "add to favorites" there is a check box to "make this page available offline" and at some point, it will ask you for how many levels to follow hyperlinks. Three levels of Hyperlinks should give you everything on a site.

Unfortunately, that method also gives you all of the external links from the site down to two levels of hyperlinks, so You'll need a lot of disk space.

I'm sure that there are freeware or shareware utilities available that will only synchronize the site without following all of the advertising links, but I suspect that most of them are for Windows/IE.

 

[w232]

The PDF way is probably the best, you're going to have to look at all the pages anyway right?

 

[bisexualsmoker]

Probably saving them manually is probably the best way though tedious.

 

[Noira]

Look in the help file for your browser for "make available offline" and/or "Synchronizing Favorites."

In IE, when you click on "add to favorites" there is a check box to "make this page available offline" and at some point, it will ask you for how many levels to follow hyperlinks. Three levels of Hyperlinks should give you everything on a site.

Unfortunately, that method also gives you all of the external links from the site down to two levels of hyperlinks, so You'll need a lot of disk space.

I'm sure that there are freeware or shareware utilities available that will only synchronize the site without following all of the advertising links, but I suspect that most of them are for Windows/IE.

Yeah, three or four levels usually does it. But this'll only work if she's taking THAT computer out. If that's the case, this is the way to do it, up there--I was looking at 'okay, desktop and laptop' as a possibility. And then when you're home you can clear offline content again. But since it'll be saving EVERYTHING, images and ads and all, it could take quite a bit of space.

Of course, on a Mac, using Firefox rather than IE the process will be slightly different but I should hope the all revered Firefox can save offline content.

 

[kindashy]

There are programs that let you save websites, including linked pages if website has more then one page or linked to other websites. I have not used such program in several years, but I think the one I used was called WebSpider or something similar. I had to tell this program how deep it had to go into the linked pages when saving particular website. It worked well, at least I had no complaints.

This looks good: http://www.httrack.com/
You will want the Linux/BSD version because OSX is based on BSD.

Good luck.

 

[abbey_kyle]

I would like to thank everyone for the great advice offered here (I knew this would be the place to come!) I am going to give everything here a shot, including page by page .pdf's if that's the only option left as I know that works.

thanks again everyone!

 

[cd1_christine]

wget?

I am rounding out the last chapter in my dissertation and am at a stopping point. Does anyone know how to save ALL the files from a website so that I may work offline?

I have five websites I am referencing in my dissertation and will be using them for analysis. I am heading out of town next week, however, and won't always have access to the net. I don't need to get in and rework or access the pages, just see them...I know I can save each page as a .pdf but some of these sites have so many pages, it would take me forever to do it that way.

I am on a Mac but can figure it out if you offer me suggestions on a PC. The browsers I use are Firefox and Safari.

any input would be greatly appreciated.

I don't know whether Macs have the command or not, but if you can figure out how to get to a command prompt (I think it's under Accessories, but I'm not sure, as I don't use a Mac, and I'm going from memory) , type 'wget' and see if it gives you an error or a help page.

If it gives you a help page, you can type wget -m http://www.dukeofURL.com and it will mirror the entire site to your hard drive.
If it gives you an error, then http://wget.darwinports.com/ might give you some information on how to install it.

Yes, it's command-line based, and somewhat ugly if you're used to flashy GUIs, but there's nothing better that I've found for quickly mirroring an entire site.

Or, if you have a PC (or possibly an Intel-based Mac...don't know about that), you could use a Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) CD/DVD to boot from, which will have wget installed already. You can then use it to download the sites to your drive.


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