Kiwix Zimit: An Easy Way To Save Small Sites Locally

So as I spend more time on Dreamwidth and in indie web spaces I'm finding people are actually posting more actual content, as in essays, stories, art, etc on their small websites rather than just making them into nostalgia retro pages and that's really cool! However one thing to remember about small sites is that, well, they tended to disappear almost as quickly as they showed up. The WayBack Machine may have pieces of a website but not everything, so if you find a cool site, you might want to be able to save it locally. Or maybe you're somewhere with unreliable internet and just want a copy of your friend's fanfiction archive locally so you can read it when you want to and not when the internet is cooperating. I get it!

One of the more convenient ways to do this I've found is with Kiwix. Kiwix is an organization that makes an app that was primarily designed to be able to download and browse various Wikipedia projects in areas where internet access is difficult, impossible, or dangerous. This works by compiling websites onto .zim files, which you can find pre-compiled through kiwix, but you can also find .zim files elsewhere or even make your own, and a very simple way to do that is through the Zimit tool. Zimit has a lot of limitations, but it usually works fantastically well on most small static sites like the kinds you find on the indie web. The resulting .zim file from the tool can be used with any Kiwix application, either on a computer or a mobile device, and you can browse through the webpage to your heart's content without an internet connection. Enjoy!