Save cached copies of your favorite webpages to your Gmail account for online and offline browsing

Save cached copies of your favorite webpages to your Gmail account for online and offline browsing



There are no shortages of good social bookmarking services on the Internet. Personally, I use Del.icio.us, Digg and Yahoo! My Web. I have a preference for Yahoo! My Web because I have the option to save cached copies of any webpages. This comes in handy if, for whatever reason, the webpage disappears. Yes, you can use a permalink but not all websites offer them. In addition, with cached copies, you can instantly view them without having to go to the originating websites.


Today, I will describe how to save cached copies of webpages to Gmail, Google’s online e-mail service. Gmail offers an astounding 2.8+ GB of storage. You can use this space to hold all your saved webpages. You can tag and label all of your webpages for easy retrieval. Using Gmail’s sophisticated search options, you can generate a list of webpages which match your search query. In addition, you can setup your desktop e-mail client to download all these webpages and have them available for offline browsing.


For this to work, you will need a Gmail Account. Sign up for one at Gmail’s website. Jot down your new e-mail address and go toread.cc website. Enter your gmail address and click [start menu]. The website will send an e-mail message to your gmail address. Return to your Gmail account and open the new message. The message will contain a link to register your toread account. Click on it to go to your account. On this new webpage, you will see 2 links, [toread] and [toread +]. Both are bookmarklets which you can drag and drop on to your toolbar. You will use [toread+] because it allows you to add a comment to your bookmark. Simply, drag and drop the link on to your toolbar. If you are using Internet Explorer, right click on the link > select Add to Favorites > select Links > [Add]. If you get a warning message, ignore it; [toread] uses javascript to bookmark webpages, which IE flags as a potential security risk.


Now, you are ready to save your favorite webpages. When you come across a webpage you want to save, click on the [toread+] bookmarklet. A new window will appear. Under comment, enter tags which will identify this webpage; separate each tag with a blank space. For example, for the Mozilla’s homepage, I enter the following tags: “mozilla opensource firefox browser freeware” (without the quotation marks). The webpage and tags are then sent to your Gmail address. The body of the message will contain a copy of the website. The tags will appear on the subject line and info.toread.cc. appears in the from field.


You can use Gmail sophisticated search options to easily find and sort your saved webpages. Open your Gmail account. To the left of the search box, click on Show Search Options. You can search by tags by entering the tag(s) on the Subject Line. You can search by content on a webpage by using Has the Words as well as search by date. Of course, you can use any combinations of these filters. You can also add labels to the messages to further sort your messages. For example, I use labels like “to do” or “important.” Now, you have a database of all your favorite webpages with an outstanding search tool to find and sort them. You can use your desktop e-mail client to download Gmail messages to browse your favorite webpages offline.

Written by Winston on March 5th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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