DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - MAR 2019

DOWNLOADING THE ROOTSTECH 2019 CLASS NOTES THE EASY WAY

©2019 Donald R. Snow - Last updated 2019-03-03

Don's Freeware Corner notes are printed in the UTAH VALLEY TECHNOLOGY AND GENEALOGY GROUP (UVTAGG) Newsletter TAGGology each month and are posted on his Class Notes Page at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html   where there may be corrections, updates, and additions.

ROOTSTECH 2019

RootsTech 2019 was held in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 27 Feb-2 Mar 2019 and the class papers are still posted online for anyone to read and/or download.  My Freeware Corner article last month (Feb 2019) was how to download them by first putting them on your smartphone or tablet and then onto your computer since the FAQs of RootsTecfh 2019 said they were not available on their website, just on mobile derives.  That turned out not to be true and there is a webpage on the RootsTech website where they are all available and can be downloaded.  Doing it this way saves an immense amount of time and is the subject of this article. 

WHERE THE ROOTSTECH 2019 PAPERS ARE POSTED

The webpage to get to the papers directly on a computer is  https://www.rootstech.org/rootstech-2019-conference-syllabi .  The papers are posted there by their class code numbers, i.e. FDD (Family Discovery Day), LAB, M, PH, and RT.  This makes it easier to find which paper goes with which class. 

DOWNLOADING FROM THE WEBPAGE BY-HAND

From downloading them on my smartphone as I described last month, the class codes are not on them and I had been thinking of entering the codes by comparing the titles with the schedule on the app.  That would have taken several more hours, but those are already in the titles by downloading from the webpage.  As you click on any class title on this RootsTech 2019 webpage, it immediately opens the pdf on your computer for you to read or to download and I went through the entire list of about 250 papers and downloaded them in about 2 hours.  What a savings of time!  I wish I had known of this webpage earlier, but the FAQs said, and still say, there is no such webpage.  BTW, before I only have about 245 files, so there are several more in this collection now.

DOWNLOADING THE WEBSITE TO GET ALL THE PAPERS AT ONCE

In Feb 2015 I wrote a Freeware Corner article about a slick way to download all the RootsTech 2015 papers at once from the website.  This method works for any conference where the pdfs are posted on a website.  I tried it on this RootsTech 2019 website and it works and only took a few minutes.  Here's the outline.  The details follow. 

(1)     Go to the webpage  mentioned above  https://www.rootstech.org/rootstech-2019-conference-syllabi .  
(2)     Download that webpage and one or two levels below it using a program like HTTrack
(3)     Use the program EVERYTHING to find all note files in the download collection that are pdf, doc, or docx, or whatever kinds of files the papers are.  For RootsTech 2019 there are all pdfs.
(4)     Copy that collection using EVERYTHING to a folder and you now have the entire collection in one folder on your computer.

(1)  ROOTSTECH 2019 WEBPAGE -- https://www.rootstech.org/rootstech-2019-conference-syllabi .
The pdfs seem to be stored as only one link down on this webpage.

(2)  HTTTRACK
Open the freeware program HTTrack available from  http://www.httrack.com/ .  The Windows version of HTTRACK is called WinHTTrack.com and I wrote a set of notes in this Freeware Corner series in 2014 about using it.  The home page contains information about the current version, a download button, links to a manual, their forum, blog, and other information.  Start the Save process by telling HTTrack where you want the files stored on your computer, then enter the RootsTech notes webpage URL, and click on  Options > Limits.  For the RootsTech 2019 notes I set it to go down 3 levels.  If that hadn't been enough, I could have updated the file structure by redoing it with 4 levels.  The more levels you save off the longer it takes and the larger the download file collection will be that you will have to sort through, so it's easier to just go down the number of levels you really need.  Be sure to tell it to download files that are *.pdf so you will get the pdfs.  The default options don't seem to include those.  Click Next and it starts the downloads.  You see blue bars as it downloads the various parts.  It took only about 3 minutes to download the webpage and a couple of levels below it.  When finished, note the folder you saved the webpage in on your computer, and close HTTrack.  If you want to, you can see the files by just clicking on the View Download, the index.html file, and it will look just like you were online, but it is reading files on your computer.  N

(3)  EVERYTHING TO SELECT OUT THE PDFS
EVERYTHING is a free program available from  http://www.voidtools.com/ and which will find all files of any kind you want on your computer.  Use it to search for all .pdf files on your computer and sort those by the path they are in by clicking in the box at the top of Path.  Fine the RootsTech 2019 folder you put the website in and highlight the pdfs by clicking on the first one and holding down the Shift key and clicking on the last one.  Drag these to some other folder on your computer on my desktop, for example, and copy them into it.  You now have a complete collrection of all the RootsTech 2019 papers in one folder on your desktop. This entire procedure took about 30 minutes, much faster than the 10-15 hours I spent downloading them with my smartphone first.
    

CONCLUSIONS

Even the by-hand method described at the start of this article only took a couple of hours to get all the papers.  The second method usingHTRACK took about 30 minutes total, but requires more technical background.  This second procedure will work to download all the notes from any conference or other website, if you have the webpage "above" where they are all stored.  Using it I now have a major collection of "How To" papers for my family history helps.  
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