World Wide Web has made enough progress from a simple information management system to current state of Web 2.0. The users need a web browser and working internet connection to access websites. When they go offline, they can no longer check their e-mail, browse their calendar appointments, or prepare presentations with their online tools. Meanwhile, native applications provide those features: e-mail clients cache folders locally, calendars store their events locally, and presentation packages store their data files locally. As the web is evolving, the possibility to access web offline is being worked out in W3C due to some support available in HTML5.
Till we get a native solution to access Web, an alternative way is to download a website completely which can be accessed offline with original link structure. Ncollector Studio formerly Web Ripper is a free web downloader with a simple and intuitive interface. It also supports downloading images and videos from a website solely. It makes an exact copy of the website by saving it local storage which can be explored offline.
After launching the application, the user needs to start a new project. The project can be of three types
File Rip mode lets you download specific file types (images or videos) from a website.
Mirror mode copies the website to hard disk without touching any links.
Offline Browse mode saves the website to hard drive and transforms the links to view/explore it offline.
After choosing the mode, the user needs to add the website source. If data on website needs authentication, you can enter the details in the next dialog box. The next box asks you to restrict the web spider/crawler to some levels or pages. URL restriction can be applied to copy data from domain, sub domain, or folder. The user can even choose to download items restricted by robots.txt.
In next step, some keywords can be chosen to search when analyzing the specified URL. There is an advanced mode in which the keyword criteria can be refined by further specification like excluding links with keywords or what type of links to which keywords should be applied.
If File Rip mode is selected, you have to go through another step in which File Types to be downloaded from the website are specified. These File Types can be Photos (.jpg,.jpeg), Images (.jpg,.jpeg,.gif,.bmp,.png), or Videos (.avi,.mov,.mpg,.flv,.wmv). When the selection is done, the user can determine the files to be downloaded by limiting the minimum or maximum file size and height or width. Last but not least, there is a Quick Rip option in File Rip mode which can be picked to increase the download speed but it may generate inaccurate results.
After clicking start button NCollector starts downloading the website according to specifications applied. The view will show you real time parsing and downloaded data with some parameters. At the end of this website downloading task, NCollector will generate a complete report of the activity performed which will be launched in your default browser.
NCollector Studio is a nice freeware website copier/downloader/ripper/saver for Windows. If you want a free offline explorer, must give it a try.
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I have used a similar tool before too! But the website in a second level domain were containing cracked links..
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