Putting a website onto a CD for distribution

I'm not even sure how to ask the question, but...

I have a music website and would like to extract portions of it (the actual music index pages and links as well as the music files) and put this on a CD to send to people who are interested in Irish music.

(site example:http://www.oldmusicproject.com/Oneils_jigs.html

At present, I've just copied all the music files into directories, then copied the directories onto a CD along with an Excel spreadsheet-based index.

This is... well, "adequate" is one term... but I'd rather give them a copy of the actual web pages which have the links to the tunes and which are infinitely more "search-able ".

I just don't know how to go about it.

It seems like it would be easy to simply FTP the relevant pages to a separate directory on the HDD, but when I do this the links are all still pointing at the website. Rather than that, I want to have the links on the pages point to the directories/files which will be on the CD.

If this was a small collection, I'd just go thru and change all the links on the pages downloads one-by-one, but I'm an old man and probably would suffer a heart attack changing some 8000 + links in that fashion.

I hope I've expressed myself clearly (probably not!) but if you can see where I'm headed and can give me a few tips, I'd be most grateful.

 

One solution that springs to mind is to load the pages into a text editor and do a global search and replace to change the links to relative links...

eg using my site as an example...

search for

Code:

<a href= "http://www.yaawns.myby.co.uk/

and replace it with

Code:

<a href= "./

If you have a number of pages with links then I'd recommend Notepad++ as it has the ability to load several documents at once and you can perform the search/replace across them all in one action.

Keep backups of the original files though just in case you make a mistake.

 

See if I understand correctly:

Take the link:

and change it to:

Correct?

 

Yes

 

TonyT: Thanks... that may knock the whole thing in the head.

Looks like whichever way I go, I may have already found the easiest and simplest way of doing it... I'd just like to improve the experience over the "hunt-and-hope" that it lives with now.

 

Got it!

However, if the recipient want to d/l the CD to their HDD (which most do), then all should be well and the switch unnecessary after that point? (Most recipients use it as a reference library and the CD portion is just for transport from me to them.)

 

OK.... it is an easy thing to add the notice in the "read me first" enclosure and to put the same on the lable of the CD... a minor difficulty in a major area.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I've also seen some programs on the web which purport to be able to "crawl" your website and package the results as a stand-alone CD. Being the sceptical little buggar that I am, I wonder if these can do what they promise. My problem with these is I don't want the WHOLE website on the CD, just the relevant music portions.

For that reason alone I think I'll try the "DIY" method first and see if I can't beat this into submission. Besides, why waste all this lovely advice then?

More on this as I progress....