Setting up WebCopy
The first time you open WebCopy after downloading and installing it, click on “Tools,” then “Options” to take a look at its settings.
General, Copy and Notifications Options are all basic and require no real walkthrough.
Appearance Options, however, are a way for you to customize how the saved websites look. You can change the variable and fixed fonts as well as how the Sitemap created for your offline website looks and feels.
Saving a website
For the purpose of our walkthrough, we’ll be using Cyotek’s tutorial web site to show you how to get the most from WebCopy.
Enter in a URL in the Website field, then click “Copy Website.”
If everything goes smoothly, WebCopy will begin the process and save the website for offline viewing. Depending on the website and hierarchy of how it’s designed, it’s possible that WebCopy may not be able to actually download it for offline use. If this occurs, the copy will be halted and you will see an announcement.
You will also be given the opportunity to look at the error logs to hopefully determine what the problem is. However, most likely there will not be much you can do on your end to correct it. 3. Once the website is finished downloading, there might still be errors detected, and you will still be alerted and allowed to go through the various results.
- Click on the “Green Arrow” next to Save folder.
This will open the folder where you website has been downloaded, if you click on any of the web pages, it’ll open in your brows navigate through the site as you would normally. WebCopy saves the layout, and by generating a sitemap of the web site, it can create a natural direction through the site as if visiting it in real time. This is where the real beauty of WebCopy comes into play. 5. Click on the “Floppy Disk” icon to save your new saved website. Saving your website project allows you to come back to it, re-download components and use the website offline any time you need.
Working with the wesite panels
After you save websites for offline viewing, these results show you what was downloaded properly, what errors occurred, the background files downloaded to load your offline site and more. This can be a way to piece together what pages are missing, what changes have been made between fresh downloads of a single website and issues you might encounter when browsing a website offline. The first panel you’ll work with is the Results. This will give you a breakdown of how WebCopy downloaded a website. You can see if a page was successfully downloaded, if an error occurred and other information.
The next panel you work with is the Errors. This will show you every error that occurred during the download, such as 404 errors.
The Sitemap panel gives you a look at how the sitemap organizes after the download.
The Skipped panel shows what pages were skipped in the website hierarchy during the download. In most instances, any domain linked outside the original domain you wanted to download offline will not actually download as part of the overall structure.
The Files panel showcases everything that was downloaded to create your website offline, including HTML files, images, JavaScript applications and more.
Finally, the Missing panel will show you what downloaded in a current website copy that may not have been included in previous downloads. These panels give you an overall picture of the website hierarchy which can be useful for creating rules to govern how a website is downloaded for offline use.
Utilizing rules for offline web site downloads
WebCopy lets you create a set of rules to apply when downloading a web site for offline use. For instance, you might not need the images from a website when viewing it.
Click “CTLR + R” to open the Rules Editor.
Under the “Rules Properties,” in the “Pattern” text box, type “.jpg” or substitute whatever image type you want to exclude from your website downloads.
You can select what Options you want for the rule, in this case, we’ll click “Exclude.”
If we click “Enable this rule,” this will exclude all JPG images from downloading when you get a new copy of a website for use offline. You can create a variety of rules for a particular website and save them all within the Project for use whenever you update your offline sites.
Conclusion
WebCopy gives you control over how you save websites for offline viewing. It’s an amazing utility for websites you visit frequently and would like to have available when you can’t get online.
