Bot News
JoBo

By Brian Proffitt

Every once in a while, a bot will come along with such a singular purpose that it forcibly reminds us of the reason why we have bots.

Bots, for all practical purposes, are really meant to help us take care of the repetitious, mundane tasks that we simply don't want to deal with. All of the fancy assistant bots and gopher bots really don't change this basic mission.

One of these single-purpose bots is JoBo, designed by Daniel Matuschek. But just because it has one thing it can do, don't think that JoBo isn't useful: it does its one thing very well.

JoBo, for lack of a better term, can be described as a Web mirroring bot. Simply put, you can point it at a Web site, set the local directory where you want the sites copied, and off it will go, happily pulling down the Web site files onto your local machine.

JoBo is a Java-enabled application, so it can run on any platform with a Java environment. There are also platform-specific installers for Windows, Mac, and UNIX environments.

JoBo is a very straightforward tool. You can even set the delay time between file downloads in order to minimize the request traffic you will generate on a given Web server. When tested, JoBo seamlessly pulled in the BotSpot site to my local computer without a hitch.

So, when you need to have a site mirrored and don't have time to monitor the entire operation, use JoBo to handle the task for you.