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brought to you by the BMB Teaching Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
When planning to show live web content in class, three potential problems may arise: The network connection might be down on that day, the site may be down or the content may have changed. To enable instructors to design lessons around online content with the confidence that they will be able to show the material in class, we provide two tools that generate local copies of web content. These tools are also valuable to make local copies of live sites shown in class for use in review sessions or future courses.
Of course, there are limitations to what can be save locally. For instance, services like BLAST or databases like the PDB will not work locally simply by downloading the front pages because they refer back to large databases and run programs that are not part of the local copy. If a class relies on a BLAST result, it is best to run the BLAST search before class and save a local copy of the results.
Both tools are add-ons to the Firefox browser. As such, they may be downloaded on the fly without having to reboot the computer and without administrator privileges.
To install these programs, search for Firefox add-on and their respective names (try [1] and [2]). Their use in our context is describe in the video tutorial above .