DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- FEB 2015

HOW TO DOWNLOAD AN ENTIRE SET OF CONFERENCE NOTES ALL AT ONCE

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DON'S FREEWARE CORNER  2015-02

HOW TO DOWNLOAD AN ENTIRE SET OF CONFERENCE NOTES ALL AT ONCE

©2015 Donald R. Snow

These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter, and are posted on  http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html  where there may be updates, corrections, or additions.


HOW TO DOWNLOAD AN ENTIRE SET OF CONFERENCE NOTES ALL AT ONCE

In past years the RootsTech website has had a link where you could download the entire collection all at once of the notes for the classes.  This year for RootsTech 2015 they have a new app, which is really very nice, but it only allows you to download the class notes one at a time.  The new app even has a place where you can type in your own notes about the class.  But before the conference, I wanted to have a complete collection of all the papers that I could put into my EVERNOTE program so I could read and search them.  And I wanted to be able to do this even when I wasn't connected to the Internet.  This Freeware Corner Note describes a way I found to do that.  This method will work for other conferences and websites where there are notes or other data that you would like to download all at once.  To use the method you need to be able to access the notes or data like you can for the RootsTech notes which are available to anyone.  Here's an outline of my procedure.  The details follow below.

(1)     Go to a folder on the RootsTech website that is far enough up in the hierarchy to be sure it contains all the notes in subfolders below it
(2)     Download that folder and subfolders using a program like HTTrack
(3)     If the notes are all in one folder in the download, they are already grouped together and can be copied out.  If they are in several folders, use the program EVERYTHING to find all note files in the download collection, i.e, pdf, doc, docx, png, etc., type files.
(4)     Copy that collection using EVERYTHING to another folder and you now have the entire collection in one accessible folder.
(5)     If you want to email a copy of the folder, you will probably need to zip (compress) it.
(6)     If you want to form EVERNOTE notes of the files, highlight all the files in the folder, right-click, and send them to EVERNOTE

(1)  ROOTSTECH 2015 FOLDER CONTAINING ALL THE NOTES
On the website  http://rootstech.org click on  About > 2015 Class Syllabus .  This is the webpage containing all the papers in subfolders -- http://rootstech.org/About/syllabus?lang=eng .  Note that the sections are named Getting Started, Computer Labs, RootsTech, LDS, etc.  Each of these sections contains 15-20 links to notes, mostly pdf's, for those classes and you can download each one individually, but my method will allow you to download the entire collection all at once.  Here you need to determine how many levels down you need to go to be sure you get all the note files.  For RootsTech 2015 three levels down seems to work.

(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 last year 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 folder URL, and click on  Options > Limits.  For the RootsTech 2015 notes folder 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.  You can leave the other HTTrack options as the defaults.  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 folder and subfolders.  When finished, I clicked to close HTTrack.  Note the path to the downloaded folder on your computer because you will need that later.  You can view the files in HTTrack by clicking on the  index.html  file.  This opens the downloaded file structure and shows you the pages just as though you were online.  To show that you are looking at files on your own computer and not on the Internet, note the address in your browser.  It will start with something like  file:///C:, rather than http://, for online websites. 

(3)  EVERYTHING TO GROUP THE NOTES
Now, knowing where you saved the downloaded file structure, see if all the pdf's, doc's, etc., are in one downloaded folder.  If so, that is the collection you want.  If they are in different folders, as they were for RootsTech 2014 last year, open the freeware program EVERYTHING, available from  http://www.voidtools.com/ , and search for the note files by using the search terms  "pdf | doc | docx| ppt | jpg | tif | png" (without the quotes) in EVERYTHING.  EVERYTHING searches for files regardless of location on your computer and shows them in a list by name, size, date, path, etc..  The vertical bars in the search terms are the "pipe" symbol which on my keyboard is on the right side above the back slash and means OR in EVERYTHING.  What you now have is a list of all files of all of these types on your computer, including the ones you just downloaded.

(4)  EVERYTHING TO COPY THE NOTES TO A FOLDER 
To find just the note files from RootsTech 2015 click on the path title bar in EVERYTHING to sort the results by their paths on your computer.  Go down the list and find the path to your downloaded RootsTech 2015 files.   This collects all files of these types that you downloaded from RootsTech 2015 into one list.  For RootsTech 2015 there are 162 files in this collection.  Highlight the first one and hold down the Shift key while clicking on the last one to highlight the entire list.  You can now right-click this highlighted collection and copy them to a new folder on your desktop or elsewhere to have the entire collection of RootsTech 2015 notes in a separate folder.  To view what is in the files without opening them use Windows Explorer and open the View Panel (top right corner).  Widening the View Panel makes the views larger.

(5)  COMPRESSING (ZIPPING) THE FOLDER 
If you want to email the collection to someone, you will probably need to zip (compress) the collection, but to use them yourself, you won't need to zip them.

(6)  ADDING THE NOTES INTO EVERNOTE 
If you want to form a Notebook with each file in a separate note in EVERNOTE -- http://www.evernote.com/ -- open a new Notebook in EVERNOTE, highlight all the files in your RootsTech 2015 folder, right click on the collection, and since you have installed EVERNOTE on your computer, one of the options in the right-click menu will be Send to EVERNOTE.  Click on this option and you will see new individual notes being formed in the EVERNOTE notebook, one for each file and named with the name of the file.  PDFs, doc's, and other texts will be indexed by EVERNOTE immediately, if you are using the commercial version, or overnight, if you are using the free version.
      
This procedure will work to download all the notes from any conference or other website as long as you have access to the online files.  For RootsTech all the notes are free and open to the public, but for other conferences, e.g. the Federation of Genealogical Societies meeting in the Salt Palace with RootsTech 2015, the notes were only available to paid attendees, so you couldn't use this approach.  One important requirement to use this approach, when the notes are not all in a single folder, is that there must be some keywords or symbols that you can sort on with EVERYTHING to locate them from the different folders.  For RootsTech 2015 the notes are in groups with starting characters LAB, RT, GS, LDS, etc., for Computer Labs, RootsTech talks, Getting Started talks, LDS, etc.  These would allow sorting in EVERYTHING to bring them together.  For RootsTech 2015 the entire procedure took about 30 minutes to download, sort, and put all the notes into a separate folder, once I had discovered the method.  I now have the entire set on my home computer, as well as on my tablet and smartphone, which I used at the meeting.  Now with the files I can search with keywords to find information when I need it later.  I hope this gives you ideas and helps for the RootsTech notes and for conferences in the future.  Good luck with it.

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