If you’re interested in GNU Wget, and live in California within a reasonable distance of either Davis (semi-near Sacramento, in Yolo County) or Mountain View (Silicon Valley), then you may be interested in coming to one of the talks I’m scheduled to give at those two locations about GNU Wget. More information can be found here (Davis) and here (Mountain View). The Davis one will take place Novemeber 15th (a week from Monday), and the Mountain View one is January 5th.

Here’s the blurb.

GNU Wget is a computer program that retrieves content from web servers. It supports downloading via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, the most popular TCP/IP-based protocols used for web browsing.

Its features include recursive download, conversion of links for offline viewing of local HTML, support for proxies, and much more. It appeared in 1996, coinciding with the boom of popularity of the Web, causing its wide use among Unix users and distribution with most major Linux distributions. Written in portable C, Wget can be easily installed on any Unix-like system and has been ported to many environments, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, MorphOS and AmigaOS.

It has been used as the basis for graphical programs such as GWget for the GNOME Desktop and KGet for the KDE Desktop and VisualWget for Windows. [From Wikipedia].

Micah Cowan was maintainer of Wget between mid-2007 and early 2010. His talk will discuss:

• What is Wget?
• My history with Wget
• How to use Wget
  • Restartable downloads
  • Website archiving/recursive downloads
  • Fine-grained controls over which links to follow
  • Content conversions for local browsing
• Wget shortcomings
• Lessons learned while maintaining Wget

Issues unique to maintaining a GNU project