Site Sucker - download a snapshot of a website for posterity

I recently decided to retire my self-hosted WordPress blog, and start blogging on a different platform. After deciding that it wasn't practical to try to import seven years worth of posts to the new platform, I decided that I would just retire the site, but leave it online so as not to break any incoming links.

For now, I'm going to leave it as-is, and continue to upgrade the WordPress installation with security updates as they come out. But ultimately I'd like to get the site to a static state where I could leave it alone and not think about it anymore. Probably the most practical way to do that would be to convert the entire thing into HTML files. And the easiest way I've found to do that with any site is Site Sucker.

Just choose your settings (like how many levels deep you want Site Sucker to go; the default is no limit), point Site Sucker at a website, and set it loose. Site Sucker will spider the entire site, at least everything it can get to via a link, and download it locally to your computer. If your site is run by PHP or ASP in the back-end, the resulting pages that Site Sucker grabs will still have an HTML extension, and any site links will be localized so that they point at the other files Site Sucker downloaded.

In my case, some clever htaccess work will be required to make sure that incoming links that are expecting my old WordPress site still find the right HTML file, but once that's done my site will live on as a static representation of all my past writing. Not too shabby.

Site Sucker is available as donationware (full-featured shareware) for Mac and for iPhone for $5US.

Tags: htaccess, html extension, html files, HtmlExtension, HtmlFiles, iphone, link, site sucker, SiteSucker, stati