by Gina Trapani
Web pages change. They disappear. They move to new URLs. They get lost or they're password-protected or they're only available on private intranets. Firefox extension Slogger saves full, time-stamped web pages to your computer as well as social bookmarking services for convenient offline searching, browsing and archiving. With Slogger, you'll never lose a Web page again.
Say you're doing a research project on the top twenty life hacks published on the Web in 2005. You Google and search and interview friends, and you collect a list of URLs. You could bookmark all the links in del.icio.us, or Yahoo! MyWeb or now, Google's Personalized Search History. But what if the del.icio.us server is unavailable when you need to retrieve your list? What if the pages you've saved disappear or change? What if you want to read these documents on a plane or at Mom's, where there is no Internet access? What if one or two of the pages are locked behind a company intranet or private network?
Enter Slogger. In this quick introduction, I'll go over how to save time-stamped versions of Web documents to your local computer to create a private, searchable information repository.
First, Slogger is a Firefox extension. So if you're not using Firefox, make the switch now. Once Firefox is installed, download and allow Firefox to install the Slogger extension (click on the slogger.xxx.xpi link a little bit down this page.) If Firefox asks you to open or save the file, "Open With" Firefox. Then allow Slogger to install itself. Once it has, restart Firefox.
When Firefox is back up, add a Slogger button to your toolbar. Right-click on the Firefox chrome between the address bar and search box and from the context menu, and choose "Customize." In this dialog, you should see three available Slogger buttons - named Save, Slogger A and Slogger B, like so. (Click image to enlarge.)
Drag and drop the Save button to your Firefox toolbar. I've placed it next to my Home button, like this:
Now it's time to configure Slogger. Click on the dropdown menu next to the Slogger save button (not the big arrow, the little one next to it.) Choose Options to get to the Slogger configuration screen.
First, set the "Folder to save everything in." I've chosen "/Users/penelope/Documents/slogger/," Windows users, it might be "C:\slogger\" for you. (Mac users, read this before continuing.)
Then, set the Slogger button behavior to "Log Current Page using Profile" and choose "HTML Personal." Also, set the button label to read "Slog," as pictured. (Click image to enlarge.)
Now, when you browse to a page you want to archive locally, simply press the Slog button to do so. After you've slogged all the pages you need for your research project or to read offline, browse to your local archive, located in your slogger directory, which you can view in Firefox using an address like this:
file:///Users/penelope/Documents/slogger/
After slogging a few pages today, my Slogger archive looks like this. (Click image to enlarge.)
Notice that there are separate entries for the same web page, time stamped to the millisecond. Slogger is really good at tracking changes to a page over time. (Though I'm not sure what those crazy characters are all about.)
The other neat thing about Slogger is that it hooks into social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, Furl and Yahoo MyWeb. To both bookmark a page online and save it locally in one press of the Slog button, in Slogger's Options dialog, check the Services tab to enter your online bookmark service info.
In fact, if you're feeling adventurous, poke around the Slogger Options. The extension is highly configurable, and the options presented in this article are the most basic. Create different Slogger profiles - like Business and Personal. Save pages as XML or CSV. Toggle logging on to save every single page you browse to automatically. Assign custom actions to Slogger Button A and Slogger Button B.
Hard drive space is cheap, and desktop search applications like Yahoo! Desktop, Google Desktop and Copernic make finding text in files on your hard drive super fast and easy. Use Slogger to build your own personal, private searchable local repository of web pages over time, no matter what happens to the copies online.
Gina Trapani is the editor of Lifehacker. Her special feature Geek to Live appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker.
[1] There's a bug setting the Slogger directory with Firefox on the Mac, i.e., a bunch of gobbledy-gook appears in the field. To fix, type about:config in the Firefox address bar. Then, set the slogger.destFolder to your destination, ie, /Users/penelope/slogger. (back to article)