"Whacking" the Web with Keep Everything

Way back in 1996, a small company, Forefront, contacted me and traded their new software, WebWhacker 1.0, for a small click-thorough to their site on my Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators page. It was the neatest piece of software. It allowed the me to download a Web page or series of Web pages to the computer desktop and the text and images were able to be accessed locally! 

To put things in perspective, this software was for Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.x with a beta version for Win 95. Those were the days when many of us were still writing HTML by hand to post our pages. It was nice to be able to download someone else's site to my computer to showcase it a workshop, since there was often not an network connection in workshop rooms. I would bring the "WebWhacked" sites on a diskette since, of course, we were all working on desktops.

Nowadays, the ability to save Web page text and images to the the desktop is built right into the Web browsers. In Firefox, simply pick FILE-SAVE PAGE. In Chrome, pick SAVE PAGE AS - WEBPAGE, COMPLETE. In Safari,it is FILE - SAVE AS - WEB ARCHIVE. Don't forget to copy the original page's URL for your citation!

However, the Web now has more types of information available than just Web pages that we want to archive or read locally when there is no Internet available. As students collect assets for a project, they are interested in Web pages, tweets, and videos. If students can download their assets to read and view when they do not have access to the Net, they can work on their projects anywhere. In addition, if educators require students to hand in their downloaded assets with their papers or projects, it can also be a deterrent to student plagiarism.

Keep Everything

There is a new software app for Mac computers and iPads created by groosoft that is called Keep Everything. It allows the user to locally archive Web pages, Tweets, videos, and more to the local computer or iPad. Users can simply drag the URL or Tweet to the Keep Eveything window and the archived pages are saved both locally and to a Dropbox folder and can be synced between all the user's Apple devices. Through Keep Everything, you can also get back to the original source page through a link icon. Another useful feature of Keep Everything is the choice available when downloading an article. The user can have the entire page archived or just simpler-looking page that includes the text of the article.

 


The app is available for both the Mac and the iPad. Here is a introduction to how it works.



I also made a short video on the Mac of how I saved a tweet with Keep Everything.