Ever since the World Wide Web became part of our everyday experience, software has been available to make the unwieldy Web more manageable.
While most of the software is aimed at researchers who use the Web, MemoWeb 3 allows dial-up users to download entire Web sites during off-peak hours and view them off-line.
The software, from GOTO Software, a company with offices in France and Canada, has a free version and a Pro Version, which costs about $30 and offers more simultaneous Web downloads -- 64 versus the three that come with the freeware edition.
Before buying the Pro version, download the free version from , the company's U.S. site.
This program has several benefits for dial-up users who may have to share computers and telephone lines. It also gives folks a way to access a large number of pages quickly, without having to wait for them to download from a server. Download times are more of an issue for dial-up users, but people with high-speed connections could still benefit from the program's powerful archival capabilities.
The program is especially handy for a user who visits the same Web sites regularly. Once the software has been configured and a user instructs it to download pages from a Web site, the software recognizes what has been updated, then adds the newest pages to the user's hard drive. All of the Web downloads are stored on the user's machine.
Because the pages are being stored on the user's computer instead of on an Internet server, a word of caution is in order. Like the old saying goes, you should be careful what you ask for. I downloaded a newspaper site to test the software and even with a high-speed connection, it took almost an hour to retrieve all the pages. Such a download would have taken much longer with a dial-up modem.
The software allows the user to set a range of options. You can download the entire site, or just specific aspects of it, such as sound files or images.
Some of the Java-based animations that appear on a Web page do continue to work on the archived version, but none of the advertisements from the original page appear, which gives the software an unexpected but welcomed ad-blocking capability.
One of the most impressive features of MemoWeb 3 is that the Web captures appear, in many cases, exactly like the original Web pages. Earlier versions of Web-harvesting software captured the text of the pages and some rudimentary images. But this software captures the entire page image, which can become confusing, because the archived page is eventually viewed by the user's primary browser.
If you're not careful, you can forget you're looking at an image of the page archived on your hard drive, and not the actual page. One hint is that the links on an archived page don't work. To get to these links, you'll have to find the page associated with that specific link.
To do this, you can use a browser-like directory that is part of the MemoWeb 3 software. Launch MemoWeb and then select "Open." This shows the user all the previous download sessions -- each session, or Web grab, gets its own file. By clicking on an individual file, the entire list of the pages associated with that Web grab appear. By scrolling down the list, and clicking once on a page, the selected page then appears in a separate viewing window. By double-clicking on the page in the viewing window, the page then appears in your Web browser for easier viewing. A third pane on the left side of the MemoWeb directory allows users to further sort material showing only images, or files, for example.
The software's flexibility also impressed. It is available in five languages: English, Spanish, French, German and Dutch. Browser choice was a plus, too. Most Web grabbing/archiving programs require one of the Big Two browsers, Netscape or Internet Explorer, but MemoWeb 3 also allows users to select another browser, like Opera.