Sunday night, as ds106 students around the globe (okay, maybe just the graded students in and around Fredericksburg, VA) experienced the unthinkable: a ds106 site CRASH, with only an hour to go before the submission deadline for the week’s assignments.

OH NOES!!

@crystalrose0784 no our server sucks. you are teh awesome

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 24, 2012

The reasons why this spells disaster are numerous and self-explanatory.

Thankfully, Professor CogDog came to the rescue for us.

and here is a lesson worth knowing, how to use google to find cached versions of web sites google.about.com/od/personalize… #ds106

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 24, 2012

But if you’re anything like me, that post served (in the weak structures of my own brain) only to show me how to get me out of my current dilemma.  I still hadn’t taken that idea and gone to the next step, to figure out that maybe I could keep this kind of problem from happening in the future, on my own, without depending on anyone else.

I know. I can be pretty slow sometimes.

So from me to you, here’s a quick run down of a way to save all the assignments (or anything else from the Internet that you’d like to be able to access offline) onto your own computer.

1) Go to the page you want to save. (duh – I know. But you’ve gotta start somewhere.)

2) Get to your browser’s options menu.  For firefox, it will be the the top of the left corner of your screen, and will say ‘Firefox’ and have a downward-pointing arrow.  Click that.

3) Click ‘Save Page As…’

4) The same kind of window that comes up when you save a Word or other document on your computer, should come up now. I have a ds106 folder on my desktop, and a bunch of assignments saved in there. I also have a Weekly Assignments folder in there (now, anyway…didn’t until Martha’s blog this week).  In there is where I put each of the weeks.  Don’t change the name of the page, btw!!  It’ll confuse your computer.  I’ll ‘splain shortly.

5) You’re done – the page is now YOURS.

If you go to the folder where you saved the file, you’ll notice that there is a folder and a file of the same name there.  This is why you have to leave the name as it was.  I tried to change Week 4′s name to Week 4 (it was named Week Four, and thus didn’t line up all nice and pretty in my files in chronological order), but it gave me an error message – it apparently can’t find the info it needs if you mess with the names.  *sigh*

The beauty of this, is that you can open this as an offline document, or you can open it in a different browser if you want.  Right-click on the file you saved, and hover over ‘Open with’.  You’ll have the option to open it in any browser you have made available to yourself on your computer – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.  A neat little thing you may notice in this section, is that you can also open the page in Notepad.  Do that, and you’ll see all the code that went into building the page that you saved – this is how the page is translated into other browsers, and why the links still work when you open the file this way, even if the original site itself is down. GENIUS!!
Happy last-minute working!  Not that anybody would be doing this again, after the fiasco that was last week and all the very plain warnings against such things we were given by our lovely professors, right?

…right?!?!