Web pages change, or may even disappear, with time and thus the only way to preserve a page forever is that you manually download a copy of that whole page to your computer. There are multiple ways to archive web pages so lets quickly recap the popular options.
If you are trying to save a page that is mostly text, services like InstaPaper or Read It Later are pretty good. Mobile users may email the page URL to mypdf@joliprint.com and get it back as a PDF file. Desktop browsers offer a “Save Web Page” feature to help you download the complete page including images. Then there are extensions, Scrapbook for example, that can also save whole web pages for offline reading.
The Problem with Web Archiving Tools
The above options seem to work well but the only problem is that they aren’t always good at saving exact copies of a web page. They do download the images, JavaScript and CSS files associated with a page but try re-opening that saved page in your favorite browser and you’ll know the difference.
If you are therefore looking for a better tool to archive web pages, one that saves everything and doesn’t mess with the formatting, check out bo.lt. Just put the URL of any web page, hit the Copy button (or use the bookmarklet) and, within few seconds, an exact replica of the original page will get saved to your online account.
Your Personal Internet Archiving Machine
To give you an example, here’s a copy of the apple.com homepage that I saved the previous week with the help of bo.lt – the site’s favicon, background images, CSS navigation bars and everything else is preserved with no effort at my end.
Once you have saved a page to the bo.lt cloud, a thumbnail of the page appears in your collection but you can also download a copy of that saved page to your computer as a ZIP file. For that, go to the details section and hit the download button as shown in the above screenshot. You can also capture multiple snapshots of the same page at different intervals just like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
To be fair, bo.lt is more than just an online tool for archiving web page – it lets you visually edit saved pages in the browser, remix them with pictures and comments, and republish. It mirrors all the images, CSS and JS files referenced in a page so even if the source disappears, your copy will continue to look like the original.
One more thing. You may also use Bo.lt to save and archive web pages that require login – like your Facebook page. This is much better than capturingscreenshot images.
No comments:
Post a Comment