Programming and Application(编程与应用)

Tools for downloading entire websites

Internet is an intriguing place that includes a wealth of useful information from ordinary knowledge to the latest scientific advance. Most people use it by diverse ways. Some people use it for entertainment, some for communication, some for work, some for scientific research and so on. The connection facilities varies according to financial, location, and culture. In most part of the world, people still use dialing up connection. Even the fastest dialing up connection is much slow during some time of a day because of the crowded status of the network. And sometimes websites can disappear overnight. How can we solve the problems? One solution is downloading the entire website to your local computer during the fasted connection time of the internet. There are actully several excellent software to achieve the goal. In the articel I will introduce three of them: WebZip, WebStripper, and Teleport.

WebCopier: I found this program in April 2003 when I searched for Webzip. After being downloaded and tested, it came out to be a very good program for downloading a whole site, better than WebZip which always has a lot of advertizement and popup windows. I hate the popups very much. Go to http://www.maximumsoft.com/ to download a trial version. Its interface is simple and clear, the functions are practicable and easy to use. I wish I will like it. After I test it for a while I found that it always crashed for some reason.

WebZip: It has a beautiful interface and powerful functions. Several years a ago, I used it to download the entire website. At that time, its excellent functions did not attract me. I just used it. But I recovered its excellent functions are the best in all site-downloading software recently. Sometimes I need to download a website to make a ebook or zipped package. For this purpose, I do like to get the whole webpage intact. That means no extra information is written to the webpages when software dealing with webpages. WebZip keep all downloaded webpage untoucheda, in their original condition. That is its most excellent funtion that I like. If you'd like to try it, please go to Spidersoft to download a trial version.

WebStripper: WebStripper is another excellent site-downloading software that I have used.It downloads web pages and sites to your hard disk then provides you with an easy way to manage and browse the downloaded sites. It is free for personal use. It has two drawbacks: 1) the managent database is not very efficient especially when a website has a huge amount of files; actually webstripper needs a very long time to open this kind of downloading website; 2)it put a lot of garbage to the downloaded webpages that waste a lot of hard disk space. And if you want to zip the entire website, the size of final package increases because of the garbage in the webpages. Except these two pitfalls, it is a very good software. Go to http://webstripper.net/ to download a free copy for personal use.

Teleport: Teleport is much like WebStripper. I do not compare the difference between them. I know they deal with website in the almost same way. But it does not have free personal use version. I has all pitfalls that WebStripper has. Go to http://www.tenmax.com/ to download a trial version.