For those of you that don’t have a 24×7 internet connection, the ability to download an entire website to your hard drive then view it offline can be very helpful and save a lot of money. In case you just need to download a single web page the easiest option is to go to File -> Save Page As. This is supported by all the major browsers. However imagine being able to view Wikipedia, Digg, CNN and every other favorite website of yours in their entirety, offline.

Downloading entire websites though can take a very long time on a slow connection and hog several gigabytes of hard drive space. However applications that download websites can be told exactly how much of a site to acquire. Once downloaded you can transfer the website files onto a USB and take it wherever you go, handy for excursions to far flung, internet deprived travel destinations!

Here are some cool applications that will get the job done.

WinWSD Website Downloader

This free software will let you download an entire website onto your hard drive. The interface is simple and easy to learn and you can specify exactly what content and how much of a website to download. Options include download the whole site (skipping multimedia), download just multimedia, just executables and more. While downloading the complete file size, download speed and time to completion is presented and you can also update a downloaded website with a newer version. You can also schedule your downloads to start/stop at set times and shut down when a download is complete. There are some English typos in the program menus and settings but nothing to worry about.

To Download go to www.download.com and search for WinWSD Website Downloader

WikiTaxi

This little application is a god send for Wikipeida addicts. It lets you download the entire Wikipedia website database onto your hard drive, taking up approximately 8GB which is small enough to fit on a USB pen drive. A simple interface displays the articles and you can tell the program to update its database from the internet whenever you want. It doesn’t all show images though to conserve on file size. For non native English speakers, the option to download a Wikipedia database in another language is available.

To Download go to www.download.com and search for Wikitaxi

Scrapbook

This is an add on for Firefox that will let you download websites to your hard drive. You can highlight and annotate web pages before you save them (hence the name scrap book). In the settings page specify how much of a website to capture, by specifying the depth of website links for the add on to follow. Specify too great a depth and it may end up saving a lot more of the internet than you intended to your hard drive (this can happen with smaller sites). You can also choose whether to download movies and images with the website.

To download go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ and search for Scrapbook.

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