Turns out it's using another project by the same author: https://github.com/tamnd/ascii-gif
The script used for the demo is at https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63... and has a comment showing how to run it:
ascii-gif render docs/demo/kage.tape -o docs/static/demo.gif
If the result is static why does it need a server? Isn't it possible to make it so that it can simply be opened by the browser? Like:
$ firefox $HOME/data/kage/paulgraham.com
Then the result would be useable on machines without kage nstalled.
Cool!
It would be especially cool to have a version that didn't require the separate serving process - even though it's nifty you can package up a whole site as a single binary.
Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?
Also, in my mind, I already have a script/program to convert HTML to Markdown, so it could actually store everything on disk as a folder of Markdown files, and then commit them to a Git repo.
It strips out all the JavaScript too, but also packs everything into a single HTML file that is easy to transfer. Binary assets (like web fonts and images) are packed as base64 strings.
They also offer a CLI powered by Puppeteer. [1]
In any case, cool stuff :)
Compared to that is there anything kage does better?
By converting it to Markdown, we save a lot of space, but it is for a different purpose and a different project: https://github.com/tamnd/ccrawl-cli
pandoc --from html --to epub --output /PATH/TO/FILE.epub https://example.comhttps://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html
(Certificates just expired for justine's website, just ignore the warning.)
Is the code also AI slop?
That said, Kage looks promising if OP can combine SingleFile reproduction quality with the HTTPTrack spidering approach. SPA's are kinda tricky with archiving and do wonder how well Kage would handle that
What I'm implementing here is mirroring a whole website, with all its subpages, so you can browse it all offline. For example, all essays from paulgraham.com.
I think the misunderstanding stems from the browser's "Save As" reference in the description. It is misleading. You use "Save As" to save a single page, not an entire website.
Also, the description lacks a clear explanation of the project's purpose. It would be helpful to include a sentence explaining that the program downloads an entire website, not just a single page.
That way, the page is self-contained as it is, but requires no bundled binary code to serve the site. It is actually safer security-wise.
The vendored script can be as simple as this:
const site = {
"path-1": "<!DOCTYPE html><html> ... </html>",
"path-2": "<!DOCTYPE html><html> ... </html>",
// More paths
}
function attachListeners() {
for (const [path, html] of Object.entries(site)) {
document.querySelector(`a[href=${path}]`).onclick = () => {
document.documentElement.outerHTML = html
attachListeners()
}
}
}
document.addEventListeners("DOMContentLoaded", attachListeners)For my own custom data format, I have a lot of private code that I plan to release soon. It is optimized for compression, fast lookups, and more. I have been working on it for two years. This is part of a larger, ambitious umbrella project: I am building Google from scratch (all open source), something that anyone can host, including the crawler, indexer, storage, and serving layers. Stay tuned!
Sounds awesome. There is a lot of untapped potential with respect to efficiently archiving and indexing websites. I saw the impressive things Marginalia Search is doing in this area (the blog is great when it gets technical). There is also a lot of very complete archives of websites out there which are not being indexed at all, and I would love to make them available for researchers. In any case, I'm interested in your project!