Happy Birthday Victoria / Web Poacher

2009-07-19T09:34:07.167Z

It was my friends' birthday the other week, and I haven't got much money to spare. So I cheapskated her and made her a present.

Basically, I made her Web Poacher. If you've ever needed to download a whole website, then this tool will help you. To give you an idea of her predicament and why she will find it useful, I will explain it to you. Good that, innit?

So, my friend Victoria makes websites for people. She's very good and I can recommend her services at her wonderful site. She's quite professional and uses Visual Studio just like many web developers out there. (I can't hear you PHP/Ruby/Perl/Python/Java people. You can all still use it, you just choose not to!). Using Visual Studio makes it easier for her to take advantage of such loveliness as Master Pages to try to keep herself DRY. This is all great, but sometimes she's giving her website to someone who is going to put it on their server, without support for ASP.NET or other such server side platforms. At this point, she has two choices: either repeat herself in Plain Old HTML for all the headers, footers, menus etc. that repeat across all the pages, or load up her favourite browser and File -> Save as all the HTML pages. But then you have to mess around making sure you've got all the CSS and images and JavaScript in the right places without being repeated. Ugh. Both are uglier than a cat's backside after accidentally eating the left over curry from the night before. (sorry about that image).

Welcome Web Poacher. It will save you much time if you are in either Victoria's situation, a similar one. Or if you indeed have to copy a whole website to pure HTML.

You can see a recent poaching of the BBC News website here (to 5 levels deep):

http://webpoacher.com/bbcnews/

So what are you waiting for? Try it!

Oh, and Victoria:

I hope you like your present!

web - Josh1 - Work

Happy Birthday Victoria / Web Poacher