If you’ve ever wandered onto a fantastic website that was so good you wanted to take it with you (including the articles, images… everything), then you know how difficult this can sometimes be. Often, images and other media are “hidden” on other servers, or else are made intentionally difficult to download. The idea is that you need to visit the website (and thereby produce more advertising revenue). While SiteSucker, the focus of this article, won’t necessarily be a cure-all for this problem, it’s a good start, and free to boot.
What is SiteSucker? Here’s a simple definition, straight from the website.
“SiteSucker is an application that automatically downloads web sites from the Internet. It does this by copying the site’s HTML documents, images, backgrounds, movies, and other files to your local hard drive. Just enter a URL and click a button and SiteSucker can download an entire web site.”
SiteSucker is incredibly easy to use, although its features make it a much more complex program than it would at first appear. To use it, simply download it from the website, then install from the DMG. Once launched, simply enter in the URL of the website you want to download to your hard drive and hit Enter. SiteSucker will start scanning through the website, finding all the files and pages it understands, and will begin downloading them to the save folder you’ve chosen (your Downloads folder by default).
There are a few drawbacks, however. First is that SiteSucker doesn’t “do” JavaScript, so any content that uses it won’t be seen, and therefore won’t be downloaded. Similarly, the developer describes SiteSucker as a “relatively simple program” that has “a number of limitations,” chief among them is the limited number of HTML tags it understands. For a full list, see this page.
SiteSucker also honors robots.txt files, which are a website’s way of limiting access to content (as well as whether the site will be scanned for inclusion in search engines). You can choose to ignore robots.txt files, however, although this is generally seen as bad web etiquette.
As mentioned, SiteSucker is free to use. It’s officially donation-ware, so any money you want to throw at the developer is appreciated, although not necessary by the terms of use.
Still, for basic website downloading, SiteSucker is a nice option. It has many options (including a lot of file type options which allow you to choose what files are downloaded, as well as how far SiteSucker should drill down into the website as it downloads), that make it very customizable. All in all, it’s a nice tool that should come in handy for people wanting to capture a website for use without an Internet connection.
http://www.sitesucker.us/mac/mac.html