Download Blogs For Offline Reading with BackStreet [Windows]

Well, I found me a great blog that I like to read and I’m going to download the entire blog for offline reading.


Step 1: Download and Install BackStreet Browser

Here it is, it’s only 1.48MB in size. Quick download, quick install.
Step 2: Set up the Parameters

Parameters is a fancy word for options. I like big multi-syllable words like maramalade andmayonnaise. Click on New to start a new project.



Enter the URL of the site you wish to download, a Title for it, and choose the Folder you want to download the site to. Under the Load tab, you’re going to set how much of the site you want to load. The default values should serve you well. Note that each level of link depth that you add, can add to the size of the download almost exponentially. Three should be plenty.





The File Filter tab is where you determine what types of files you wish to exclude or set size limits on the files. This helps you restrict just how much is downloaded. Let’s say the site has a lot of images that don’t have much to do with the content. You might exclude JPEGs then. Then the site would download quicker and take up less of your hard drive.



Under URL Filter you can choose which protocols you will access. If the site has a protected section you don’t want to access, you might uncheck HTTPS. If the site has an FTP download site, say for free programs, you might want to uncheck that as well, to speed up your download. The Server option can be used to determine where the files are downloaded from. Some sites use server balancing or mirror servers. Choosing Follow other servers would allow for downloads from them. Download pages only from other servers would download strictly from mirrored or associated servers. I’m not sure why you would want to do that. Maybe the main server is down?

Folder options are to limit what folders are canvassed for files. By having it on only Follow only subfolders, the process will take files only within the tree of the first file accessed.



Now the Connection tab. Here you can decide how BackStreet will identify itself to the server. If you don’t want the site administrator going through their stats and seeing their site was downloaded by the BackStreet browser, you can choose one of three other browser types. Here you can also set up a connection through a proxy server, but I’m not sure why you would do that for a legitimate connection.



Others. Good old Others. The catch-all tab for stuff that didn’t have a home elsewhere.Folder Structure is a neat option. I recommend selecting Copy folder structure especially if you are making a back-up of a site for transfer to another server. I don’t see much sense in changing the other values here. But as you use BackStreet more and more, you may want to tweak these values. Once you have everything in place, just click the OK button.


Step 3: Downloading

Here it is downloading! In the bottom frame, you can see what file it is working on. You can also see in the top frame, just how fast it is downloading as well as some other stats. One of the best things about BackStreet is that, if for any reason the download is interrupted, it will simply wait until it can reconnect and keep downloading. Especially useful for very large sites.



There the site is downloaded. By expanding the tree in the left frame, you can see that the directory structure has been kept pretty much intact. Now I have a full local copy of my own blog, should I need to recreate it one day on another server.


Step 4: Viewing the Downloaded Blog

You can view the site within the BackStreet browser, however, it doesn’t work that well where scripts and stylesheets are involved. I prefer to view things in my Firefox browser. Here’s how to do that. Open Firefox, and click on File>Open File.



Now navigate to where the index.html page of the downloaded site is. Choose that file and click the Open button.



Voila! Your downloaded blog is now readable, completely offline.



Wait a minute! It looks crappy! Yes it does. Please keep in mind that most websites today are generated on the fly. Lots of things are put in there dynamically from databases or functions or linked files elsewhere on the web. It isn’t really feasible to download all those things for just one site. Then you would have to set up a web server identical to the one where your site is hosted as well as a database and database connections to properly duplicate the blog.

What matters here is the content. I can read each article on the blog completely and fully, with the majority of the images being in place too. How awesome is that? Moderately awesome, yes. Extremely awesome when it’s raining and you are stuck in a tent with a half-full mini keg of Heineken.

If you were going to download blog for offline reading, which one would it be? What’s you’re favourite off-line browsing tool? Like Heineken? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

How To Save A Complete Webpage For Offline Reading

Save a complete page so that I can read it later? Why would I need to do that? After all, don’t we have those things called bookmarks? That’s fine as long as the web connection holds. Even a simple thing as a journey from Point A to Point B could take us away from our 24 hour plugged in lives. We have got so used to the web, that the information so readily available is taken almost for granted.

Then there are some webpages which have snippets of information that’s like gold dust. With the web as it is, the important content could go down tomorrow with the website shutting down or just having a server catastrophe. Call me paranoid, but when I come across a nugget of web information, there are times when I like to save the entire webpage in its exact glory. Copy-pasting it into MS Word would of course, be a simpler way.


But why go that route when one has a few other options to save a webpage for offline reading. These few ways could help us keep our favorite webpages close by, to be read when we need to.
Saving Complete Webpages With Save As

I am probably wasting a few lines here but all browsers have the feature to save complete webpages. They have had it since the early days. It’s a simple one click saving job and here’s how it’s done in three of our popular browsers.



Firefox

From the menu, click on File ““ Save Page As”¦ (Or alternatively, press Ctrl+S).



The Save As dialog window appears. Select Web Page, complete in the Save as typedropdown.



The webpage is saved as a set of HTML file and a folder that holds the other elements of the page.



Firefox’s page saving command can be further improved using the Save Complete Firefox add-on. Though, I didn’t notice much of a functional difference between the default and the add-on aided saves.
Chrome

Chrome also has a Save as option. You can access it from the Page icon that’s next to the address bar. You can also load the webpage and right click anywhere on the page to get to the context menu. Or do the quick keyboard thing with a press on Ctrl+S.



The same kind of Save As dialog window appears and lets you save the page as Web Page, complete in a location of your choice.
Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer also follows the conventional File ““ Save As routine. But just when you start to ho and hum, you will notice that Internet Explorer gives you another option in the Save as type dropdown. It reads ““ Web Archive, single file (*.mht).



This is exactly the kind of convenience you were looking for. Instead of a complete folder that tags along with each saved single HTML page, we now just have a single file. MHT orMHTML (MIME HTML) is a standard for saving a webpage as a single file. It was introduced by Microsoft as a way to tie together all webpage elements like images and HTML together into a single file.

Not all browsers are pally with this format. Opera is the only other popular browser that has the MHT save. Firefox users though can call upon two add-ons to handle this file standard, Mozilla Archive Format & UnMHT. Both these add-ons can be installed and used to open and save complete webpages.

The MHTML file format is one of the ways to save complete webpages as single files. But it is definitely not the best way because webpages get displayed differently across browsers. Also, MHTML is not so good when it comes to handling Javascript code that’s a usual part of webpage code.
Saving Complete Webpages With Firefox Add-Ons
Scrapbook Plus



Scrapbook Plus claims to be an improvement over the better known and similarly namedScrapbook. Tina did a very early review of Scrapbook in her two part series on Offline Browsing Anywhere Anytime (Part One & Part Two).

Scrapbook Plus is similar but aims to bring faster handling of all your saved pages. You can set options for what you want to retain from a webpage and the level of pages you want to link down to and save. You can capture all tabs and sort them in specified folders. Both Scrapbook and its Plus avatar come with the Combine feature.
Read It Later



We have written about Read It Later before. Read It Later is a browser plug-in that comes with absolute ease of use. With a single click you can save the currently displayed webpage. For offline use, just download your saved pages to the local machine and read it when you are away from the net.



You can click through links (instead of opening the pages) and save them for later reading using the “˜Click to Save‘ mode. All open tabs can be concurrently saved too.

The best part of Read It Later is its inter-operability between many browsers and mobile devices. Read It Later has a lot of official applications and a few user created ones that makes it one of the more recommended tools to have in your browser.
Saving Complete Webpages As PDF

Saving webpages as PDF files sounds like taking a few steps back. Especially after we have seen the ease add-ons bring to the task. But consider a tool like PDF Download. PDF Download can be installed as an add-on or a bookmarklet on most of the browsers (Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer).



With a single click, PDF Download’s Web-to-PDF feature lets you quickly and accurately convert any (unsecured) webpage into a high-quality PDF file. The PDF file can be printed, shared or just kept in a folder for later viewing. Or just merge them all into one combined bundle using the free PDFHammer from the same developers.

Do you archive webpages for offline reading? What’s your favored method?