Wikiwoo
September 19th, 2006I’m addicted to looking stuff up. If someone asks me a question that I can’t quite answer, I’m straight on Google to find out. When travelling without a network connection, the immediacy of this approach can be lost. I often search using my phone over a GPRS connection, but that can get expensive, and reading the results on a 2 inch screen is a pain. Enter Webaroo, a free website-packager, not unlike a cross between AvantGo and Internet Explorer’s MHT web archives.
The twist with Webaroo is that they are offering pre-packaged slices of the web, including all of Wikipedia in a 6GB download, as well as a promised 40GB ‘all the web’ package later in the year! Not that it hasn’t been thought of before, and I’m doubtful about the usefulness of a 40GB web archive to me, but the value of being able to grab any number of websites and read them in an airport departure lounge without paying their mad wi-fi charges can not be understated.
One small flaw is that password-protected sites are not easily downloaded – my Bloglines roll would have been nice to have saved on disk, but Webaroo borks at the login page and never gets to the content. According to Webaroo’s online help, there’s a browser-based way to add password sites, but it only works a page at a time… not quite optimal.