Now guys, let's don't quibble! I think there's been a misunderstanding. Using WebReaper, I just successfully copied to my hard drive and burned a CD of the website. It worked beautifully! And it was pretty user friendly. But I think what Bill was saying and warning us about is that when you copy a website you can specify how "deep" it will copy. It's called levels or threads. You can tell Web Reaper to copy 1, 2, 3 ,4 or more levels. This means that it will copy the links to the websites within the website. Bill is saying that you should restrict the level depth or else you could cause problems for the server. If you tell it to copy too many levels, then it will fill up your hard drive with a lot of useless files from other people's websites.
When I copied the site, I went to 3 threads (levels) deep. I think this has been a very useful discussion. In fact, I'm thinking about copying my own personal website to CDs to give to my customers as a catalog. Then I won't have to make a duplicate catalog in Word or Publisher. This might come in handy to those of you who want to be able to mail your website to a friend or client. It sure is faster to read a CD than to download a 15 MB website on a crummy modem! And it's even faster if you save it to your hard drive. Many many thanks to everyone for helping to solve the problem. Now I can rest knowing that the website can be preserved as it is in case something happens to Dave or his server. And this will help us to get the word out about stained glass sundials. I'll have copies for anyone who wants them at the BSS and NASS conferences and maybe I can talk Fred into putting it into The (digital) Compendium. John John L. Carmichael Jr. 925 E. Foothills Dr. Tucson Arizona, USA Tel: 520-696-1709 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sundial Sculptures Website: http://www.sundialsculptures.com Stained Glass Sundials Website: http://advanceassociates.com/Sundials/Stained_Glass ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bill Thayer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <sundial@rrz.uni-koeln.de> Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2004 2:22 PM Subject: Re: Capturing web pages/sites > > There > >are many valuable and valid reasons why people may wish to capture websites, > >without wishing to 'steal' intellectual property which is what you seem to be > >inferring. > > Goodness. I said nothing whatsoever about intellectual property or > stealing. The material I did mention by way of illustration, in fact, > is all public domain; wasn't even thinking of that. > > I did address the horrible, wasteful drain on servers. I've seen the > hundreds of lines on server logs, very similar to the hundreds of > lines in e-mail logs caused by spam and viruses. I sympathize with > people who may, for example, be running a site on sundials in (fill > in the location), and find their server log cluttered with these > automatic downloads. The English-speaking person who goes to a site > with some interest in Pliny the Elder, then to download en masse the > Mémoires de la Grande Mademoiselle (qui sont entièrement en français > du dix-septième siècle, et donc on se demande bien à quoi ça peut > leur servir), etc.... > > Exactly as I said then, if you have a reason to use these devices, > set your settings correctly and don't scoop up everything out of > incompetence or laziness. Everything that is served to us on any > computer anywhere, costs someone something. > > The agents can, by the way, be blocked on a one-by-one basis -- I > block a number of them on my own site -- by lines in ".htaccess" > files; but new programs are constantly springing up. > > As for > http://www.archive.org/ > that *is* piracy. It is illegal to copy other people's work if it's > still under copyright. If you wrote a book on dials in 1993, for > example, it is illegal (and unethical) for me to make it available to > the entire Internet just because it's out of print. > -- > > Bill Thayer > http://tinyurl.com/iquh > > - > -
