Semalt Expert Advice – How To Scrape A Website
ScrapBook is a famous Firefox extension that comes with enhanced page saving, note-taking, bookmarking and scrapbooking functionalities. With ScrapBook, you can easily save web pages on a local computer system. However, you cannot access the downloaded files from another computer device or smartphone. The ScrapBook extension can be used in combination with other synchronization services that can sync the folders where ScrapBook stores its data.
Development of this Firefox extension:
Danny Linn developed ScrapBook at Murota Laboratory and won a couple of awards at Extend Firefox Competition. Some of its latest versions are ScrapBook Plus, ScrapBook Lite, ScrapBook X, and ScrapBook Plus 2, which have come with interactive features.
Download the entire website using ScrapBook:
Do you want to download the entire or partial website for offline uses? ScrapBook is the only Firefox extension that helps save different web pages to your hard drive. It is lightweight and speedy and caches the local copy of a site perfectly. Plus, ScrapBook supports multiple languages and has been tested with different CSS styles and graphics. This extension can be used to organize the data and edit the collected web pages. Its HTML/Text Edit feature is similar to that of Opera's Notes.
Install the Firefox extension:
If you are running the latest version of Firefox (v33), you will have to adjust its settings to use ScrapBook properly. By default, its icon does not show up anywhere, so you would have to right-click on the webpage and add the button to the toolbar manually. In the next step, you need to click on the Customize button, and ScrapBook icon will be visible on the left side.
Use ScrapBook to download a site:
Once the ScrapBook icon is visible, you can now use it to download the entire website. First of all, you will have to right-click on the website and choose the Save Page As or Save Page button. ScrapBook will start downloading styles, text, and images to your hard drive.
WinHTTrack – An alternative to ScrapBook
If you are not using Mozilla Firefox and still want to download the entire website to your computer, you may opt for WinHTTrack. This program allows us to download the websites to a local computer and arranges the downloaded documents appropriately. WinHTTrack can also update the existing files and resume interrupted downloads. It is configurable by different filters and options and has a user-friendly interface.
WinHTTrack uses a particular web crawler for downloading a site. Some parts of the website may not be downloaded properly because of the robots exclusion protocol. So, you would have to disable the program and restart your window. WinHTTrack follows the links that are generated with basic HTML and JavaScript codes. It is unable to deal with sophisticated links and cannot download dynamic sites properly.
Conclusion:
Both WinHTTrack and ScrapBook have their own advantages and disadvantages. WinHTTrack is compatible with almost all web browsers while ScrapBook is compatible with Mozilla Firefox only. However, both extensions require a good amount of space. So, you should make sure that you have enough free space on your hard disk.
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