The World Wide Web is a wonderfully huge, messy, continuously changing place. Can you remember (and sometimes, be able to prove) exactly what a Web page looked like when you found it? This week I will show you one of the simplest ways to solve this problem, and a little known use for it.
Remembering how Web pages looked like? What do you mean?
Online services like InstaPaper or the Evernote Web Clipper do save complete copies for later reading, either on the Web or in corporate intranets. Saving as PDF serves a similar purpose, in a completely different way. And, of course, if a page is 100% static and you bookmark it, you can always reload it whenever you are online. “Remembering exactly how a Web page looked”, however, is something different from all these services and actions. It’s about preserving something exactly as it was in the moment when you saw it, even if it includes dynamic parts that a PDF can’t reproduce, or the original page disappears from the Web — or you have no Internet access.
The ScrapBook solution
The Scrapbook extension for Firefox is a really easy way to make perfect snapshots of Web pages. Its online documentation is very clear, so I will only explain what are, in my opinions, the main pros, cons and useful ways to customize it.
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