Site indexing & caching
 

There's another thread which discusses [url=http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=1660]offline mode[/url] and how it functions in IE on Windows.

I have been traveling more and more and thought of an even more useful take on this - the ability to cache sites including pages not visited. For example, take this forum. When I'm at an airport, I would like to be able to hit a button and have OW quickly spider and cache the site based on some criteria. Then when I get on the flight, I can surf the site locally.

There are page "sucker" type utilities that download pages to your drive. They have criteria such as how many levels deep to go and if they should go to external pages or not. OW could use similar criteria for preferences.

Generally a good idea, but not too easy.

Especially: How to deal with dynamically generated pages, like forum pages? A tool that would be able to generate a locally browsable version of a forum would have to transform every link that actually sends form data to a non-dynamic link and generate a filename for the resulting page. I don't know if there are tools out there that are able to do this. (Would be possible, of course, not even _too_ difficult, but did anyone have that idea yet? X-) )

A really good feature should be able to complete an already existing archive of a forum with only the new posts. Most forums use post numbers in the CGI-GET-URLs—no problem there. But the forum index is generated on te fly—i.e. "page 1" is always the one on top with the new posts, different every day you look.

Not easy to achieve, but possible. Would be quite a feature for OW to be better than the average. If the Omni Guys have the time to code it. X-)

With forums, I'm familiar with most of the boxed solutions and have worked on a few custom ones. For actually grabbing forum lists and post content, I can't think of one that requires the submission of form data.

And all of the forums I'm aware of do generate a unique filename, even if it's just the appending of a URL variable.