Have you ever wanted to have a copy of your favorite blog to read offline?
WebCopier, a program that downloads entire Websites to your computer, certainly hopes so. The software will save an entire dot com to a hard drive, allowing you to view and print the contents at any time.
Should bloggers be worried about such a program? I mean, this seems to make it awfully easy for someone to grab years worth of valuable posts and do whatever they want with them. Sure, a content crook can sit there and copy and paste (or print) every blog entry; where there’s a will there’s a way. But at least those methods might discourage people because of their time-consuming nature.
On the flip side, Webcopier can be a useful tool for bloggers. The software can backup all of your posts or let you (or someone without Internet access) examine your Website for broken links, typos, etc.
WebCopier for Linux is free for personal use. Windows/Mac users can expect to pay $30.
So are programs like WebCopier good or bad for bloggers? Or, do they have no impact?
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These tools have been around for many many years, and they do make it easy to do as you said, most of the ones I have seen rewrite URLs and code to point local instead of to the web, making them useless for the download and them upload to a new site logic. Furthermore they do not download the code for a site, just the rendered HTML, so even if they did upload it, the finished product would be a shallow copy of the original.
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This already exists as part of most Linux distros, I believe. It’s called “wget”.
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WGET can be a little unreliable when it comes to images in CSS files and such though, or at least it was when I last used it.
I find WinHTTrack a better option for Windows, which has a lot more configuration and is UI-based — it’s also completely dedicated to getting a reliable copy of websites with plenty of options for the outputted files, while I believe mirroring sites is more a side-purpose of WGET.
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I don’t think it’ll change anything at all.
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I’d do it this way.
Add any blog’s feed to your google reader and use google gears for offline browsing. how is that?
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I’m aware that these tools exist. On my personal blog on my domain I watched as someone used such a program to steal my blog contents and later I saw the contents published on a splog as though they belonged to someone else.
I took the route of making a DMCA complaint and the web hosting company powering the splog in question and they shut it down. However, this does not prevent them from doing it again and I lack the time and energy to spend on tracing these content thieves.
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I’ve been using SuperBot (a superior alternative product) for years.
I’d say they are good for bloggers, because you can save reference material, ensuring it is available when and where you need it.