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Download managers: Get your fingers out of my browser!!

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superboyac:
Ah!  Flashgot!  I forgot about that.  Finally, a use for it that makes sense.  I always thought Flashgot was a weird program.  Everything it does, it seems like a download manager, but it explicitely states that it's not.  So you install it anyway.  Then, you use it along with your download manager, let's say IDM.  But IDM works fine without flashgot, and IDM has all the same options as flashgot.  So what is flashgot really doing?  That's the situation I ran into a couple of times, so I decided I really don't need flashgot.

But having multiple download managers now make flashgot useful.  Maybe I'll give it a shot now.  I just was never clear on flashgot's exact purpose.

40hz:
I used it to download all the online HTML help files (on-line manual) of a program I use so I could have a copy to refer to when I am off-line. It was much easier than page by page saves.  Had all 102 files in about 60 seconds. :)-bob99 (November 13, 2010, 09:20 AM)
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You might want to check out ScrapBook - while it doesn't handle "grab all links on a page", it's very useful for quickly for (fully) saving a single page for offline viewing. It's a tool I'm pretty happy to have in my repository :)
-f0dder (November 14, 2010, 12:27 PM)
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@fodder: nice find. I hadn't heard about ScrapBook.  :Thmbsup:

Another alternative for grabbing single web pages is a utility called Canaware NetNotes. It allows you to download complete pages and save them to "libraries" on your PC.

The thing I really like is that it saves the actual HTML and doesn't do anything proprietary to them or use a database.  And the "libraries" you create are just standard folders on your hard drive.  As a result, it's super light on resources - and the saved pages are viewable in anything that can read a webpage as opposed to just NetNotes itself. There's a plugin that puts it in the context menu so it's accessible via a right click from within your browser. Great tool. I use it to compile and tag collections of tech data and how-to articles for my personal knowledgebase.
 8)




Get it here

f0dder:
Scrapbook also saves the plain files, but the pages can be a bit tricky to find since the folder names the scraps are stored in are timestamps. It also stored a "scrapbook.rdf" and "cache.rdf" - I dunno if scrapbook can rebuild them if they go missing.

I hardly ever bookmark anything these days; sites I visit frequently have shortcuts on mouser's LaunchBarCommander, other sites are saved in browser history (and thus available fast by searching in the firefox address bar), sites I need to check out later are saved in browser session (I'm SO looking forward to FF4/Panorama so I can group stuff and reduce visual clutter!), and stuff I might check back on a lot later is saved to scrapbook; it really sucks when you need a piece of information and the hosting site is gone, or the URL scheme changed.

cyberdiva:
At one time or another, I recall installing Scrapbook, Canaware NetNotes, and several other programs with similar purposes, but I never got into the habit of using any of them.  I don't really know why.  What I have gotten into the habit of using is Surfulater.  I use it to capture, organize, and retrieve web pages (whole or in part), as well as Word documents and text files.  I think what won me over about Surfulater were the ease with which I could organize my information and its very fast search mechanism.   Surfulater is a bit pricey, but the $79 price tag permits you to use it on up to five computers.

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