MM3 Web Assistant: Software to invisibly mirror websites

[Neuru]

I found this really neat tool, probably useful for those who archive anything fringe from the web. I guess it qualifies as a "research tool". The website's lead summarizes its purpose better than I could:

WebAssistant - Proxy Offline Browser is a neat trick. By passing all your web traffic through WebAssistant, you instantly and transparently build a copy of all the pages you visit - so they're yours to surf offline whenever you like. There's no difference between surfing the web and surfing your archive; you can even use your bookmarks or search your pages offline when you don't have a network connection. When online the proxy updates your cached web pages and adds new pages automatically. This feature distinguishes the utility from most other offline browsers.

http://proxy-offline-browser.com/ <-- Download it here

It's likely some of you have been mightily annoyed when a valuable website suddenly vanished from the web and found that the Wayback Machine never got to archive it. This is an "archive as you browse" solution to that, it's like your own private ECHELON you can use to spy on yourself. It doesn't overload the server like a mirroring tool would and it's not nearly as tedious to set up properly. Also, it shows you in the browser which pages have been archived. The downside is that you'll have to manually go through the site to have everything archived.

Important: After installing, go to Surf Sets -> Protocol -> HTTP Header -> Browser name (User-Agent), remove the tick mark there and click Store. Then absolutely nobody will be able to tell that you are using this proxy thingie. Verify this at http://whatsmyuseragent.com/, make sure there's no "MM3-WebAssistant" after your browser's name. If you use Firefox, make sure to install this extension too: http://www.proxy-offline-browser.com/ProxySwitch/

For the confused: Yes, you can indeed use it to archive any YouTube videos you watch and copyrighted websites you read and in both cases the server logs won't show anything out of the ordinary. Seriously. Just be aware that I don't condone these activities as they aren't legal. So don't do them. Not that anyone will know if you do it anyway.

The "Private Edition" is free to use. It's written in Java so you'll have to download Java but hey, that means it works on Windows, Linux and on those biblical-fruit-powered machines too. You know, those PCs that are not PCs.

Full disclosure: I don't get paid for posting this although I wish I was...

[Doc]

Thanks, Neuru. There are a few places that I return to every so often to re-read some history or find links. I've worried that they might not be there some day but I don't get around to saving it, etc. This is a good solution.