And now for a third post in my trifecta of tools for information viewing and copying – the free HTTrack Website Copier allows you to download the entire Internet to your local drive.

No, not really – but their web site does a nice job of explaining what it does:

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. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

Last year I was working my way through reading a fairly large set of local history interviews and photos from the town near where my grandmother was born. These interviews contained interesting stories and I believe more than a few clues to the relationships of various families in the area.

Then, one day I noticed a new post on the home page of the website: due to lack of local interest, it was to be taken down within several weeks. To avoid losing access to this resource, I broke out my trusty HTTrack, pointed it at the web site in question, set a local directory on my PC to save it in and let it rip. Read More

In my previous post I wrote about the open source Greenshot screen capture tool. Here’s another quicker tip and tool to use –

Have you ever read a site comprised of several columns, with unrelated ads embedded in the center of the article you are trying to read?

Have you ever wanted to save an article for later, either by converting to PDF or just plain printing it – and all of the text and formatting gets discombobulated in the resulting output?

Well then, Readability is for you! Their own web site describes it as follows:

Readability is a web & mobile app that zaps online clutter and saves web articles in a comfortable reading view. No matter where you are or what device you use, your reading will be there.

I have not used the features that allow things to be sent to alternate devices (like a Kindle), but I do use it regularly in my web browser to simplify articles for archiving.

Take a sample page from the Irish Times – while not a particularly bad offender in the world of confusing page layouts, there is a lot of “noise” on this page. If you’d like to copy the info in the article, more often than not you and your trusty mouse will be in a fight to the death to select the article headers and content. Read More