This section provides information on downloading the entire GANSG website so that it can be stored on the hard drive or placed on a CD complete with working menu system and links. The site is currently (later 2007) just over 100MB in size. Links to external sites offering suitable software are included on a sub-page (see link at bottom of this page), this is to allow the downloading of the GANSG site without collecting these pages as well.
An off-line browser allows you to collect an entire website and place it on a hard drive or CD with all the links remaining active. The main advantage of doing this is that you can then use search tools on your computer to locate references of interest anywhere on the site. This is much more effective, and a lot faster, than searching via the web itself.
If you just told the software to follow all links you would end up downloading the entire Word Wide Web, to avoid this problem the programs used will allow you to specify the number of levels of link that are collected. To facilitate this kind of downloading I have re-structured parts of the GANSG website, giving a consistent structure of 'Main menu - Sub menu - Individual page'. Almost all the external links are more than three levels down the site 'tree', hence, if you set the software to collect the first three levels of the site you should get all of it with little external material. Not all external links have yet been buffered in this way but if you use a downloader on the site as it is you should only get a few non-GANSG pages (you will always get the DA2C home page as that is linked from every page on the site).
If you wish to recover a single section of the site you start at the sub-index for the section and recover two levels (the Index and associated pages). This will also pull in the main site index and the DA2C home page but these are small and this should not be a problem.
If you have no interest in railways you can download Appendix One on its own, this section contains all the non railway material (the section on Lineside Industries might also be of passing interest).
The intention is to test various freeware downloaders and add details on how exactly to do the job to this page, this will take a while however.
I have not used such as system for some years (and the program I use is no longer available) so I asked for feedback on this. The suggested software can be accessed via the links on the sub-page linked below.
