I downloaded a website
Misty wrote recently about how to archive websites locally on your own computer. I've never done this before! I decided to give it a shot!!
I downloaded the app she mentioned in her post, Archive Webpage, and used it to archive my own website. It's a manual process - you start a session, click through all the stuff you want to archive by hand, then stop the session. I found this kind of contemplative. (I've yet to try out the crawler she mentioned.)
I then saved the archive to my NAS and opened it up. It works!! I can see my website as if I were browsing it normally. There are plenty of outgoing links that do not work - if it's not in the archive, it won't browse there on the live web - but it got everything I viewed. Nice!!!!
I did try archiving a bunch of the outgoing links, though, so it did archive whole snapshots of various sites I actually clicked through to. This ended up making the archive Pretty Large. It's over 300 MB even though my site is not particularly big. I've decided to slap it into my NAS like a tombstone regardless. If I ever need to save room really bad I can just delete it.
I'll delete this test archive if I need to because archiving my own website is a little silly. I have all that stuff backed up in multiple places already! I have a couple other sites I'd like to archive just for fun, though... weird stuff like Misty mentions, basically. Maybe Tamanagerie. It's delightful. Maybe some of the stuff I used to link to on my interesting link tag, both here and on Cohost.
Anyway, you should give it a shot! It's extremely easy, almost brainlessly so, and you don't really need to know anything meaningful about web technology to do it. Thank you to Misty for the recommendation!!