We have had a bunch of useful travel planning tips already. Here’s a fun Facebook tool to make your travel plans social, here’s how you can plan a road trip with Virtual Tourist and don’t forget to check out Gowaza to make an informative travel plan map. This time we are sharing a brand new travel planning iPhone app from Stay.

Stay is a free fun web-based tool we have reviewed previously. Basically, it offers a great feature set for planning and mapping your traveling and then saving and sharing your plans with friends, relatives or random people. Just a few days ago, the site launched their official free app for the iPhone which makes downloading and accessing your travel guides much easier.

Creating Your Guides

To create a travel guide, you will still have to use the web-based application. This is the first thing to do because you won’t be able to do anything with the app unless you have an account with Stay.com with travel guides already created.

Creating a guide is addictive though. The web interface is clean and very easy to use: you just browse the places and add them to your guide. There is no clutter or extra details interrupting the process. You browse the categories (like “Attractions”, “Restaurants”, “Art Galleries”, ” Hotels”, etc) and add anything that looks worth visiting to your guide. Search results are sorted by popularity among the site users – which makes picking fun places even easier.

Once your guide is ready, you can download it to your iPhone.

Using The iPhone Application

To upload your saved guides to your iPhone you will need Stay’s official application which is free. When you have it installed, log into your Stay.com account (it supports Facebook login which makes things even faster). Immediately after you log in, you can download your guides.

The best thing about having this app is that all your city guides will have a complete offline map, so when you are away traveling, you don’t need to worry about finding an Internet connection:

To edit, improve or complete any of your existing guides, you will need to use the web-based interface again. But the good thing is, your iPhone guide will be updated automatically:

Travel Guides Inside Your iPhone

You will most likely love having your travel guides inside your iPhone because:

• Your guides are well structured (all your favorite destinations are broken into categories, so you can easily plan each day of your vacation),
• You can view your guide on the map with all your chosen destinations pinned;
• Each place you have added to your guide has a “more info” section with photos, description and location details.

What do you think of the tool? It looks like a high-quality free app that is worth a check. I am not sure how the app works for less popular locations though. I have checked a few and it seemed to be rather detailed. What’s your experience?

In this article I’m going to introduce you to a cool freeware app called WinWSD, written by Attila Keszi of Hungary.

This application is similar to the apps Tina covered in her mini series about offline browsing, where she covered Scrapbook and HTTrack. However, WinWSD is a bit unique because it lets you identify not only a single website, but multiple “start pages” that it will crawl through and download the entire section of the web you’ll need to later browse each website from those starting points.

Downloading An Entire Website

The most common use for applications like WinWSD is to download a “mirror” of an entire website. This will basically let you browse every single page on an entire website even though you’re offline. Obviously many external links or images won’t work properly, but all of the local files, scripts, images and videos will all work without an Internet connection.

Initiating a download is easy. Once you’ve installed WinWSD, just go to “New Project“, create a new folder for your local copy, and then the Project Settings window will open.

The Project Directory will be the directory you’ve just created before this window. The project name can be whatever you like, but most important is the “Starting URLs” field. To download an entire website, insert the root domain of that site in this box. You can click or unclick any of the boxes to define how the program will crawl through the site, but default settings are usually fine. Once you’re done and back on the main page, just go into the “project” menu option and click “Start/Restart.”

This initiates the crawling script, which will go through all links, starting from the “starting URL” and it will download each entire page including all images, videos and more. As the process goes on, you’ll see 5 threads (downloads) running at once at the bottom of the screen. You can increase or decrease the number of threads depending on your processor power.

The window to the left shows the download and website statistics – things like the download speed, the hard drive space consumed by the mirrored site on your drive,  and any errors.

The large center pane of the application is basically a web browser. Once you have an entire website backed up to your hard drive, you can use this application to browse through the website while offline. You can also browse the site using any Internet browser of your choice by opening the index.html file in your project folder with that browser.

You can see the location of the file that you’re viewing at the lower part of the browser window. You know you’re browsing offline when you see that the location starts in “file:///” and the url is the project location you defined in the settings.

The file structure for a site mirror is basically a directory for every web page, which includes all files like html pages, images, videos and whatever else makes the page load correctly. Local links on the page go to the directory for that new page. External links remain the same, so obviously those won’t work while you’re browsing offline.

Download Entire Websites From Several Start Pages

Now, this application really stands out when you want to conduct offline research using articles from multiple websites. Let’s say that you’re working on a research paper and you’re conducting Google searches for good reference material. You’ve got a trip coming up, so you don’t have time to read through those websites, but you jot down the URLs in Notepad.

One option you could use if you want to read through those entire web pages offline is to take a mirror of those pages using the article URLs you found as the “Starting URLs” in the Project Settings.

Here, I’ve pasted three URLs I found for some research on a speech that President Obama gave in Michigan. I set the three references that I found as the Starting URLs for a new project, and then clicked on Start/Restart under “Project.”

As you can see above, such a search takes a lot of space (1,483 files in this example), but if you have a portable hard disk, it shouldn’t be a problem. Basically you’re downloading the entire page with images and other files, as well as downloading the entire page of any internal sites that page links to. This way, while you’re reading those articles offline, you can click to any other internal pages and those links will still work.

Here is what offline viewing looks like, and you can see the offline location as well as the subdirectory for this particular “Project.”

You can create a new project for every research topic you want to work on offline, which helps keep all of your work organized. If you travel a lot, WinWSD can really help optimize your research work even though you have no access to the Internet.

Have you ever used WinWSD? What do you think about the software? Do you know of any other offline browsing alternatives? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Internet and Future by CJLUC

Then there are some webpages which have snippets of information that’s like gold dust. With the web as it is, the important content could go down tomorrow with the website shutting down or just having a server catastrophe. Call me paranoid, but when I come across a nugget of web information, there are times when I like to save the entire webpage in its exact glory. Copy-pasting it into MS Word would of course, be a simpler way.

But why go that route when one has a few other options to save a webpage for offline reading. These few ways could help us keep our favorite webpages close by, to be read when we need to.

Saving Complete Webpages With Save As

I am probably wasting a few lines here but all browsers have the feature to save complete webpages. They have had it since the early days. It’s a simple one click saving job and here’s how it’s done in three of our popular browsers.

Firefox

From the menu, click on File ““ Save Page As”¦ (Or alternatively, press Ctrl+S).

The Save As dialog window appears. Select Web Page, complete in the Save as type dropdown.

The webpage is saved as a set of HTML file and a folder that holds the other elements of the page.

Firefox’s page saving command can be further improved using the Save Complete Firefox add-on. Though, I didn’t notice much of a functional difference between the default and the add-on aided saves.

Chrome

Chrome also has a Save as option. You can access it from the Page icon that’s next to the address bar. You can also load the webpage and right click anywhere on the page to get to the context menu. Or do the quick keyboard thing with a press on Ctrl+S.

The same kind of Save As dialog window appears and lets you save the page as Web Page, complete in a location of your choice.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer also follows the conventional File ““ Save As routine. But just when you start to ho and hum, you will notice that Internet Explorer gives you another option in the Save as type dropdown. It reads ““ Web Archive, single file (*.mht).

This is exactly the kind of convenience you were looking for. Instead of a complete folder that tags along with each saved single HTML page, we now just have a single file. MHT or MHTML (MIME HTML) is a standard for saving a webpage as a single file. It was introduced by Microsoft as a way to tie together all webpage elements like images and HTML together into a single file.

Not all browsers are pally with this format. Opera is the only other popular browser that has the MHT save. Firefox users though can call upon two add-ons to handle this file standard, Mozilla Archive Format & UnMHT. Both these add-ons can be installed and used to open and save complete webpages.

The MHTML file format is one of the ways to save complete webpages as single files. But it is definitely not the best way because webpages get displayed differently across browsers. Also, MHTML is not so good when it comes to handling Javascript code that’s a usual part of webpage code.

Saving Complete Webpages With Firefox Add-Ons

Scrapbook Plus

Scrapbook Plus claims to be an improvement over the better known and similarly named Scrapbook. Tina did a very early review of Scrapbook in her two part series on Offline Browsing Anywhere Anytime (Part One & Part Two).

Scrapbook Plus is similar but aims to bring faster handling of all your saved pages. You can set options for what you want to retain from a webpage and the level of pages you want to link down to and save. You can capture all tabs and sort them in specified folders. Both Scrapbook and its Plus avatar come with the Combine feature.

Read It Later

We have written about Read It Later before. Read It Later is a browser plug-in that comes with absolute ease of use. With a single click you can save the currently displayed webpage. For offline use, just download your saved pages to the local machine and read it when you are away from the net.

You can click through links (instead of opening the pages) and save them for later reading using the “˜Click to Save‘ mode. All open tabs can be concurrently saved too.

The best part of Read It Later is its inter-operability between many browsers and mobile devices. Read It Later has a lot of official applications and a few user created ones that makes it one of the more recommended tools to have in your browser.

Saving Complete Webpages As PDF

Saving webpages as PDF files sounds like taking a few steps back. Especially after we have seen the ease add-ons bring to the task. But consider a tool like PDF Download. PDF Download can be installed as an add-on or a bookmarklet on most of the browsers (Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer).

With a single click, PDF Download’s Web-to-PDF feature lets you quickly and accurately convert any (unsecured) webpage into a high-quality PDF file. The PDF file can be printed, shared or just kept in a folder for later viewing. Or just merge them all into one combined bundle using the free PDFHammer from the same developers.

Do you archive webpages for offline reading? What’s your favored method?

Image Credit: kirk lau

The big-screened iPad works as a great e-book reader but when you’re nowhere near a WiFi network, you might want to read other things like the latest updates from MakeUseOf or CNN. Are iPad/iPod Touch owners out of luck? With the use of a native app, users might not be.

Here’s a workaround for those who wish to keep up-to-date with their favorite blogs and have most of their feeds at their disposal in their iDevice even when they’re not nearby any WiFi networks and without any paid apps. This tutorial will show you how to get RSS feeds emailed to your iPad or iPod touch.

I devised this workaround and tested it with my iPod Touch after I tried a number of great free iPhone apps (MobileRSS and NetNewsWire, among other great offline use iPhone apps) that could sync to Google Reader, but found that very few of them saved the feed items and random web clips for offline reading the way I liked.

This method uses no special app other than the native Mail app, plus an RSS-to-email service to deliver the feeds to your email. Since the Mail app is how you get the RSS feeds emailed to your iDevice, when you press on your email account’s folders, you can read your feeds, even offline.

Since your read feed items (that is, the read emails) will be synced to your account, you can keep tabs on which items (or emails) are still unread on your desktop browser.

How to Get RSS Feeds Emailed To Your Gmail

• First off, choose whether you want to use your primary Gmail account or a new one (just for the feeds) because this method will have feeds flooding your inbox. Either way, you’ll have filters to label the emails and have them skip the inbox, but some people may be overwhelmed with the number of labels showing up on their Gmail sidebar. I use my main account so I can read my unread items whenever I’m on my computer without logging out.
• Now use an RSS-to-email service to get the feeds coming to you. I’d recommend the wonderful BlogTrottr which emails you real-time updates of your favorite blogs, and which we have featured before.



• You can use BlogTrottr’s bookmarklet to subscribe to your favorite blog’s RSS feed in one click. You’ll have to enter your email address (I used my main email account to keep tabs on read and unread feed items on a desktop browser) after clicking on the bookmarklet so BlogTrottr can send a click-to-confirm email. You can also replace your email address in the bookmarklet’s code to avoid entering your email every time (instructions are on the bookmarklet’s page).

Alternatively, you can subscribe to your favorite blogs’ newsletters, or use FeedMyInbox but the latter only allows you to subscribe to 5 sites for free (though you could combine multiple feeds).

Set Up Filters In Gmail To Label & Archive These Feed Emails

So of course your inbox will now start to be bombarded unless you set up filters to archive the feed emails with the correct labels (which will be seen as folders in your iDevice’s Mail app). If you’re using Blogtrottr, all your emails will come from busybee@blogtrottr.com.

Set up filters where emails from that address that have your favorite blog’s name in the subject will skip the inbox, be labeled something like “reader/tech/makeuseof” and never be sent to Spam.

The “/” in the label name is important to be able to see a hierarchy of subfolders in the Mail app.

You’ll have to create a filter for every blog you subscribed to which might take some time. If you enjoy reading MakeUseOf, How-To Geek, Digital Inspiration, Lifehacker, Scientific American, CNN, Mashable, I might be able to help you with the filters I’ve uploaded here. Just make sure you have enabled the Filter import/export Gmail Labs feature. You can delete any filters for blogs you don’t read.

If you receive Facebook notification emails, you can also filter these to be labeled “reader/social/facebook“.

To get notifications of updates from the people you follow on Twitter, I’d recommend using ReadTwit, which MUO has featured before. It includes whatever’s on the short URLs of Twitter users in an RSS feed, and then subscribing with Blogtrottr. This is useful for sites like CNN and the New York Times, which only offer partial feeds.

For example, here’s a tweet by NYTimes that ReadTwit made into an RSS feed item.

Read Your Feeds In Your iDevice’s Mail App

So now that you have your incoming feed mails marked with the right label, go to your iDevice’s Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and turn on Push.

Below where it says Fetch, choose Manually. This enables you to basically sync your email accounts, calendars, and contacts to, let’s say, Gmail, GCal and your Gmail Contacts, whenever you manually open the respective apps.

Now you can use the Mail app to read your feeds when you’re on a WiFi network (or set up your Gmail on your iDevice if you’re using an account other than your main Gmail account). Press on All Mail if you know you’ll be out of a WiFi network soon and let the app complete its download.

Then you can read your feeds in your Mail app offline while any unread and read items will be properly marked as either unread or read under its label (or folder) in Gmail next time you encounter a WiFi signal. Since this method uses your Gmail storage (7+ GB), only keep read items you feel are good for future reference; otherwise, trash your read items.

Be forewarned that this method has two drawbacks: You can’t view images in your feed emails as the Mail app doesn’t seem to download them locally, and you can’t view feeds by blog name (e.g. “Tech,” “Social”) unless you open up all of those specific blog folders before you go offline, which is why opening All Mail works.

Really? Isn’t Using Gmail As A Feed Reader Just Asking For A Cluttered Inbox?

It doesn’t have to be. The blog emails will remain tucked away (archived). If this still doesn’t convince, check out the following Gmail Labs features, which will make the reading experience on a computer browser, a bit more like the one you get from using GReader, or simply more intuitive. Of course, you don’t have to enable all of these as they may become intrusive to some people’s workflow.

• If you’re using a secondary Gmail account for your feeds, enabling Advanced IMAP Controls will let you choose to hide the other “location labels” such as Trash, Spam, Buzz, etc in IMAP so your iDevice only shows All Mail and your blog folders.



• Enabling Multiple Inboxes and typing the search queries for all emails from one blog category in one pane will give you something more GReader-y. For example, if I wanted to group all the Technology labels in one pane, I’d type “(l:reader-tech-makeuseof) OR (l:reader-tech-labnol) OR (l:reader-tech-lifehacker)” in the Search query box and name the Panel title “Technology.”



• If you like labels and sub-labels in a hierarchy, make sure to enable the new Nested Labels feature.



• So that your sidebar won’t expand all the way down for displaying so many blog labels, enable Hide read labels. This can help you keep up with what blogs you still have unread items in.
• Want to share your feed items like you can in GReader? There’s no need for Labs features since Posterous has got your back. Just email Posterous so you can share your piece to Facebook and Twitter.

Not Only A Feed Reader, Gmail Can Also Be A Reading List For Later

Any interesting items on blogs that you don’t follow but that you find useful, you can clip and email them to yourself with the uber useful GmailThis bookmarklet. Set up a filter so that emails to youraddress+inspiring@gmail.com or youraddress+howto@gmail.com will be labeled “reader/inspiring” or “reader/howto”. This way you can still look back at them offline. If you’d like to be able to view the pictures in these web clip emails while offline, just email them to your personalized Evernote or Instapaper email to view them offline (both have apps for you to view items offline; with Evernote, just make sure to Favorite the note.)

Do you use Gmail for anything other than email? What do you think of this workaround? We’d love to hear you in the comments!