HamsterBase

Saving web pages for offline reading can be done to preserve some reading material for when your connection goes down. You can essentially save any type of page, yet some do better than others: news articles, or anything text-heavy for that matter, can work especially well.

A gripe I have with this is there’s no interface to collate all the web pages you’ve downloaded. You see where I’m going with this? HamsterBase has an answer: an environment where your saved web pages are all present and can be highlighted, annotated, and filtered as you see fit.

Maybe internet instability is an order of the day affair for you, or perhaps you want to go off the grid and want to save a few treasured web pages to peruse every now and then. All the program does is provide an environment where you can more comfortably look through those downloaded pages: simply drag the relevant HTML, MHT, or Webarchive files, and the program will accommodate them into its interface.

Most of the formatting will be kept intact, but your mileage may vary. The program simply reads the contents of those files and displays it for you. To that end, it is displayed quite nicely, so you can enjoy reading those pages at your leisure rather comfortably.

Much like a reader app, the program lets users highlight and annotate any passages of interest within the saved pages. Clicking the Notes icon or using the Alt+N hotkey will display all of those highlights and annotations.

The filtering capabilities are also quite advanced. You can filter based on a page’s annotation count, labels, link duplication, and so on. Very useful.

HamsterBase is a well-made tool that ultimately brings some order to the often-disorganized nature of saving web pages. My experience was positive, and I would recommend it to anyone who often finds themselves saving web pages for offline reading.