Some­times, web sites reach the end of their lives, and con­tin­u­ing to host them for archival pur­poses is not a respon­si­bil­ity or expense that any­one wants to go to. Per­son­ally I hate the idea – after all, the W3C’s com­mand­ment that “cool URIs don’t change” has been stamped into me over the years – but some­times it’s inevitable.

Take the Yes Day­light Sav­ings cam­paign, for exam­ple. This was a cam­paign web site that we built for a group of busi­ness peo­ple pro­mot­ing the “Yes” cam­paign for West­ern Australia’s Day­light Say­ings ref­er­en­dum in 2009. Sadly, despite a sin­cere, sen­si­ble and great-looking cam­paign, the ”No” vote won out and we are still miss­ing out on that gor­geous hour of extra sun­shine every day in summer.

Regard­less of the cam­paign out­come, main­tain­ing the WordPress-driven site, keep­ing it up to date with secu­rity fixes and ensur­ing spam­mers didn’t take it over was not an option.

That’s where site archivers can come in handy. On the cou­ple of occa­sions where I’ve had to lay a site to rest, I’ve used HTTrack, an “offline browser”, to spi­der a work­ing offline ver­sion of the site and pack­age it up on CD for pros­per­ity. Then when the plug is pulled, you’ve still got a work­ing copy.

HTTrack is free, active and reg­u­larly updated, avail­able for Win­dows and var­i­ous flavours of Linux, and does an awe­some job.