Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Today’s featured program won’t be for everyone, but it may prove to be invaluable to those who discover they have a need for it. This one’s on the Productivity page.

HTTrack (or WinHTTrack for Windows) Here’s another completely free open source jewel. This is a marvellous utility for copying entire websites to the hard drive of your computer, including all of the graphics and the internal relative link structure. This means that you can have access to the website when you cannot be online. It also means that you can make a local backup of your own website or blog.

I used WinHTTrack to copy this blog to my computer, and it worked flawlessly. Even when I am offline, the blog opens in my browser, and it looks and functions exactly as intended. I can move between pages, and if I click on an internal link it works just as though I’m online. For example, if I click on a category link, it will bring up all the posts associated with that category.

The user interface of HTTrack is intuitive, and the help files, complete with screenshots, do an excellent job of walking a new user through the process of copying a website. The help files even offer helpful advice on how not to use, or abuse, the program. This section covers issues such as permission, large websites, use of bandwidth, etc. Under the Help menu, you also have the option of checking for updates to the program. This program is available at http://www.httrack.com/.

This program runs in Windows and Linux.