Blue Crab Lite is a tool that lets you download entire websites. It is a stripped-down version of Blue Crab, which costs $24.99 and comes with a few extra features. If you only want to download a website for offline browsing, this "Lite" version is all you need. The first thing that you need to do to download a website is to type in its address. When you do that, the application will start doing its work. The first process examines the URL and determines how many levels it will download. For example, say you want to download the entire LA Times website. The first level will be its cover page. Each link that the application follows from the main page will be a second level, and so on. The more levels there are, the longer it will take to download a website. You can't really specify how many levels you want to download, but you can limit what the application downloads from the app's Preference window. Here, you can uncheck the settings Allow Secondary Domains and Grab Offsite URLs to speed up the process.
Depending on the site, the download will take just a few minutes or hours. News websites and similar sites with lots of links will take longer than say Blogs or photo slideshow sites.
v2.0 [Jul 13, 2011]
• URL data loading option: "Load URLs From Disk" - this option is available in the Preferences window. It is ON by default.
• If this option is selected: When grabbing a website, URL data will be loaded from disk, if available, rather than loading it from the internet. This feature is intended primarily for resuming a download that was terminated more quickly, and not for updating a website previously downloaded.
• Grabber windows display "Looking for url disk file" in the status message area when the option is selected.
• Speed is also improved since pages loaded from disk will not be relinked or remapped, also, data is not re-saved to disk because it is identical.
