I use a program
called
Surfulater to manage all the
resulting mess. It was designed to be used on a computer while you are
browsing and is the ultimate web researchers tool. As you browse you can
quickly capture just the content you are interested in. You select text and
hit a hot key to create an article, which contains the selected text, images,
and a link to the online web page. You can then edit the data, add your own
notes, and attach additional content or web pages. You can organize the
articles into a folder structure and all the content is saved for offline
use - in an organized, searchable fashion. You can even save the entire
webpage offline as an attachment. You can do the same thing for existing
offline content you have saved or are transferring to your computer via the
Flash drive.
If you want to gather lots of pages from a single
website, there is a program called
Portable
Offline File Browser. It installs on
your USB stick and does not require any additional installation on the host
computer. This is important because most GOOD internet cafes won’t allow you
to install any software; it’s too easy for hackers to get on. It is designed
to help you save the entire website's page or sets of pages. Say you found a
page that interests you but you don’t have the time to read it all in the
cafe. With POB, you have a couple of options that help save the website’s
pages. You can use their browser in record mode to save the content you
visit, or download the page you have selected and all of its links. I
usually check out the links in another browser and then browse in the
recording browser if I want to save that specific page. With the automatic
download, it will search the specified page for ANY links to other pages. It
then downloads those pages and follows the links to the depth you specify
(say three levels). You also have control over which additional sites it
navigates to (as it find links) or you can contain it to just the site
you’ve specified (my preferred solution). It downloads the files in parallel
so it is fast and it saves the data to your USB flash drive in a structure
that you can still easily navigate/share once you get back to the boat. You
also have the option of translating links to offline files so that you can
navigate the downloaded pages as if you were online (by following the links
on the pages). This is much easier than trying to find pages you saved with
“File Save As” and opening them individually.
Windows has an offline mode that supports downloading
portions of a website (or all of it) onto your computer. You can access it
offline and browse it as if you were online. This works great if you can
always find a connection for your computer. There's a couple of inherent
issues for general use. It uses Internet Explorers cache (compressed
unrecognizable files) which makes it impossible to extract the data to take
from the Cafe back to your computer or to share with others once you’ve
downloaded it. It can take up a lot of disk space and congratulations,
you've just moved the craziness of the internet to your desktop. Google
Desktop helps you search your desktop including your web history but the
inherent problems with the cached files are still there.
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