Blue Crab is a program that you use to copy the contents of a website to your computer, whole or in part. You can use it for faster offline browsing and searching. Or it can be used as a labor saving device at times when you need to download an archive of images, PDF's, or any other media type.
- Create a snapshot of a website for historical archiving.
- Collect resources such as images or PDF's using filters.
- Make a local copy of a site for browsing offline when an internet connection is not available.
- Search content more thoroughly with up-to-date content.
With Blue Crab you can download all the content including HTML, PDF, graphics, video, file archives, etc., or use powerful selective filtering to restrict downloads to specific kinds of files. For example, you can choose to save only the JPEG images Blue Crab finds, or just the PDFs.
Starting with a single URL Blue Crab begins traversing the site by following the links on the HTML pages it finds. Blue Crab does not stray off the domain of the starting URL; in other words it won't download the whole web! Moreover, you can restrict Blue Crab to a subset of the given website.
Blue Crab is gentle on the server. It processes only one URL at a time and may be configured to grab resources at preset time intervals.