Index everything with Firefox or GDT

March 20, 2007 4:31 PM

Is it possible with either a firefox extension or a google desktop plugin to cache or index everything I view on the internet?

I have Firefox and Google Desktop installed on my machine I want to know if there is a Firefox ext or GDT plugin that will more or less save everything I view. Presently if I view the cached pages in gdt it will show all the text from the page and most of the pictures. Is it possible to have it save all the pictures, and if not why? also is there a free application that will do it for me? thanks
ps I don't care about the amount of space this could take up on my hard drive.

posted by antisocialiting to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

A better solution might be to run a proxy service, with a huge space for cache and without a timeout. This way, you'd save everything you view in a more seamless manner. The downside is that having a proxy where you turn off cache expiration could really muck up your browsing.

What is the problem you're trying to solve? Do you want a constant record of everything you've seen, so you can view it even weeks or months later, or just to have a seamless browsing experience, so that if a page changes or gets deleted, at least for a while you can see it as it originally was. In either case, running a lightweight proxy and pointing your browser at that will probably be a cleaner solution than a browser plug-in.
posted by hincandenza at 4:40 PM on March 20, 2007

Response by poster: I want constant record of everything I've seen, so I can view it even weeks or months later,
posted by antisocialiting at 5:11 PM on March 20, 2007

er....doesn't google desktop already do this?
posted by jourman2 at 5:40 PM on March 20, 2007

my bad - i got confused as to what you were asking.
posted by jourman2 at 5:45 PM on March 20, 2007

You could try going to about:config in the Firefox address bar, type cache into the Filter: box, and changing browser.cache.disk.capacity from the default 50000 (the size is in kilobytes, so 50000 means 50 megabytes) to something stupidly large.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 PM on March 20, 2007

Also, checking "work offline" in the File menu will restrict Firefox to showing you only those pages that already exist in the cache.
posted by flabdablet at 6:06 PM on March 20, 2007

I think Slogger does this. I use an extension called scrapbook which is nice for my needs but doesn't seem quite powerful enough to do what you're asking for.

The Firefox add-ons site should take a page from amazon and offer advice like "the people who looked at this extension installed these extensions." I think there may have been a third option that I considered before I settled on Scrapbook but I'll never remember it.
posted by stuart_s at 10:55 PM on March 20, 2007

slife (used to be Onlife) for mac does this. and makes nice graphs to boot.
posted by zpousman at 11:23 AM on March 21, 2007

antisocialiting: I want constant record of everything I've seen, so I can view it even weeks or months later

Actually, that Slife linked right above by zpousman might be perfect, if you are on OSX and if it really does do caching of the pages you visit. Seems like just the thing you're looking for: keep track of your activity for months, an d be able to search/see what you were doing on a day, what the page looked like, etc.

Barring that, the best solution is some lightweight proxy service running on your own desktop or on another machine in your home. A browser plug-in is going to be more restricted, and likely have disk limits far lower than what you'd need for months of browsing history (i.e., many gigabytes). I'm not sure what OS you're on, but basically the storage needs and retrievability are what proxy servers are going to be much better at than your built-in browser cache. They'd keep a log of activity, as well as cache of the pages visited.
posted by hincandenza at 11:44 AM on March 21, 2007