The Scrapbook Firefox extension

Everyone who uses Firefox has their favorite extensions, but this one has to be up there as one of the best pieces of software out there.

Simply: It lets you capture and save any part of a Web page, or the entire page, to your hard drive. When you do it, it saves everything locally you need to recreate the page — images, JavaScript, whatever. It can even go several layers deep to capture an entire site… if you have the hard drive space.

Scrapbook creates a straightforward, human-readable folder structure, and saves everything in the same format you found it — standard HTML with standard JPG and GIF images, and so on. So you’re not locked into in for the long term.

Your Scrapbook ‘collection’ is fully searchable, of course, so it’s a great way to capture stuff you find interesting but don’t know will be around forever (e.g., magazine articles).

Besides being a great tool for doing research and dumping what you find in a convenient place, it also lets you capture those transient pages. I’ve snagged some that I knew would be taken down (because of controversy, errors, etc.).

But wait, there’s more. You can edit what you capture to remove page elements you don’t want. For example, I used it to grab my clips from the Roanoke Times Web site, then removed all the crap on the page — the gadzillion ads, giant site-navigation boxes, etc. I printed the result to a PDF and presto: Clean, electronic clips.

So for doing research, preserving Web sites, or simply saving pages for offline viewing, Scrapbook is a kick-ass extension.

Scrapbook Firefox extension; free.