Problems with ripped website

[Hooobi]

A business owner who's shutting down operations told us we can have her website (we'll be running similar operations with the same clients and staff). I downloaded everything using Black Widow, but when I open the index page (or any other page) in Frontpage, it only shows the background and text and only placeholders for all the figures, buttons, etc. I have no idea why it won't work.

I also uploaded it to our new host and created a mirror (i.e., domain1.mywebsite.com) to test it before I change the name servers. Nothing's loading when I go to the mirror site.

Any idea what could be wrong? How to troubleshoot? My skills in this area are limited to creating an ebay page in Frontpage.

TIA

 

[wkinney]

I am not familiar with Black Widow, however from your explanation it sounds like either
- the images were not 'downloaded' correctly from the original site, or
- the link references to those images in the html files are incorrect, either from Black Widows fault or your own.

I would suggest looking at one of the image locations where it would go, see where its looking, and double check that location relative to the html file.

 

[Hooobi]

Well... that definitely helped. I can barely figure out the code, apparently it was done in dreamweaver and has a bunch of java and scripts, but I figured out that some buttons needed to be in a subdir and it appears that other buttons are completely missing. Any thoughts on the best approach for ripping a website that will maintain the dir tree, etc. and download all files? BW doesn't seem to have done that.

Thanks

Originally posted by: wkinney
I am not familiar with Black Widow, however from your explanation it sounds like either
- the images were not 'downloaded' correctly from the original site, or
- the link references to those images in the html files are incorrect, either from Black Widows fault or your own.

I would suggest looking at one of the image locations where it would go, see where its looking, and double check that location relative to the html file.

 

[DaveSimmons]

To copy a website properly, you need to use an FTP program like CuteFTP and download the folders, etc.

A "ripper" usually just impersonates a browser and gets the _results_ of script pages instead of the actual pages, and gets any server-side includes as part of the page instead of as separate files.

 

[Hooobi]

hmmm... I'm not sure if I can do that because I don't have admin access to the site. The former business owner had it created and set up for them and when they gave us the materials, all they included were setup cds for MS Exchange, but nothing that would help access the folders. Is there another way of getting the actual files?

Thanks

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
To copy a website properly, you need to use an FTP program like CuteFTP and download the folders, etc.

A "ripper" usually just impersonates a browser and gets the _results_ of script pages instead of the actual pages, and gets any server-side includes as part of the page instead of as separate files.

 

[wkinney]

assuming the buttons you are talking about are images themselves, Black Widow should have downloaded these buttons and the directory structure correctly. However where it is probably failing is where some javascript is referencing images, and black widow is not recognizing this and getting the correct images. It probably only supports straight html.
Either try a different program, or ask for ftp access or server access to simply download the files directly.
Or right click on the images/buttons that are not showing up in your browser, and hit properties. This should tell you the image it is trying to get but can't find. Use this reference to download that image, one by one, by typing it in the url.