Easy When You Know How
Fed up with having nothing to read on the 19.09 from Waterloo, Daniel Booth tries to…
Download web pages to read offline
Every morning and evening, travelling to and from work, I sit in a train carriage that lies to me. Above one of the doors is a small sign that says ‘Wi-fi is available on this train’.
Let me fact-check that claim, as is fashionable these days: no, Wi-fi isn’t available on this train - at least, not for more than 30 seconds at a time, and at a speed that loads web pages slower than Ivor the Engine whistling and puffing through snow.
If I want to browse the web while commuting, I have to rely on my phone’s 4G connection. But I don’t like squinting at this small screen for too long. By comparison, my laptop’s screen feels like something from an Odeon multiplex, but without reliable Wi-fi the only way I can read web pages on it is to first download them to my hard drive and then open them offline. I’ve started to do this using an excellent free program called Cyotek Webcopy, as I’ll explain in a moment.
But first, here’s a glimpse into my working day. I spend most of it buzzing around the internet, often spotting an interesting article that I don’t have time to read. For example, while writing about the old Amstrad games now available online (see page 9), I wanted to double
While my fellow commuters are playing Candy Crush on their phones, I’ll read why Stalin and Hitler agreed not to fight each other
check that decathlete Daley Thompson spelt his surname with a ‘p’. His Wikipedia entry confirmed this ( www.snipca.com/ 33678), but before returning to my work I spotted a link to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where he won Gold and which is the earliest Games I remember.
Keen to read more, I opened that page, which had dozens of other interesting links, including one on the Eastern Bloc countries that boycotted the 1984 Games. Several clicks later and I was on a page about the 1939 Molotov–ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Fascinating stuff for a history buff like me.
But print deadlines wait for no editor, so I couldn’t spare the time to read these pages. Instead, I downloaded them using Cyotek Webcopy. Here’s what you do: first visit www.snipca.com/33715, then click the green Download button at the top of the page. When you install and open Webcopy, its main page will appear, with the URL ‘ https://demo. cyotek.com/’ highlighted in blue in the Website box.
Replace this URL with the page you want to download (see 1 on our screenshot) then click the Copy button 2 on the right and you’ll see Webcopy scanning the page. When it finishes, a ‘Website copied’ box will appear. Click Open Output Folder to find your downloaded page (the default folder is c:\downloaded Web Sites 3 , but you can change this). When you’re next offline, click either the folder or browser icon, and you’ll see links to the downloaded pages.
You’ll notice that the pages may not feel like proper websites, lacking working links and pictures. Go back to Webcopy then click the Skipped tab at the bottom 4 . Here, you’ll see which parts of the web page Webcopy didn’t download, and why. Any ‘External’ files 5 are hosted on another site - they could be images or links to other articles (a Wikipedia page can have hundreds).
Files classed as ‘Above Root’ 6 are pages from elsewhere within the website, so the URL may have more forward slashes after the page you’re downloading. If you regularly download from the same site, you can set up ‘rules’ to skip the same unwanted content each time.
My efforts mean that this evening, while my fellow commuters are playing Candy Crush on their phones, I’ll read why Stalin and Hitler agreed not to fight each other, and then why, two years later, Hitler changed his mind with such with catastrophic consequences.
If such light reading doesn’t appeal, there are 49,325,296 other pages on Wikipedia (a figure that will have increased by the time you read this – check at www.snipca.com/33716). And you don’t need to stick to Wikipedia: there are 6.4 billion web pages in total (see www.worldwidewebsize.com). That should keep any Trans-siberian commuters busy.
Need help downloading websites? Let us know: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk