How do I save a script/content rich web page as a local file?

September 27, 2008 2:07 PM

What is the best way to save a script/content rich web page for archival reasons from a remote server, locally?

I would like to save my World of Warcraft Armory Page as a local file, for archival reasons. Is there a way to do this that would preserve all the mouse-over's and in general be a complete recreation of the content available? If so, what is the best way to do this? Is there a way to do it without locking it into a particular web browser or viewing program?

More on the reasons why:
Whenever a new item in the game is found, the armory web site is updated. A history of changes isn't reflected on the web site.

What I've tried:
All of the "Save Page As..." options in Firefox 3.0.3.

posted by nickerbocker to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Since you're using firefox, there's this extension: Save Complete.

If you want to keep everything accessible from within firefox, use the Scrapbook extension. I'm fairly certain it does what you want.

If you want to automate it, I'd suggest learning bash scripting and using wget. (If you're on windows, use Cygwin to get bash and wget.)
posted by Axle at 2:52 PM on September 27, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks for the reply, Axle. I tried the Save Complete extension you recommended for Firefox but this did not work for either the WoW Armory, or WoW Heroes (which is similar to WoW Armory). I do have some experience with wget and shell scripting on my mac mini, so I'll play around with that. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
posted by nickerbocker at 4:11 PM on September 27, 2008

I've had pretty good luck with HTTrack. But I've done a fair amount of writing code that does this sort of thing and there just isn't any way that an automated process can be 100% successful with every web site; whatever solution you use, you might have to debug what the problems are and write code to "nip and tuck" the resulting files to get everything to work correctly.
posted by XMLicious at 6:48 PM on September 27, 2008

It looks like the page is loading in content dynamically (there's a script called character-info-ajax.js and a "Loading..." message when mousing over things), so you're not going to be able to save the page locally and get it fully-working without an awful lot of hacking about to grab all that data and change the way the scripting displays it.
posted by malevolent at 12:00 AM on September 28, 2008