« New Favorite Toy | Main | Try Breeze For Free in July »
July 02, 2004
Cool Tool Friday: The Wayback Machine
I apologize in advance for the abbreviated post today -- especially on Cool Tool Friday -- but I'm about to get on a plane, so I only have a few minutes to get this up.
Anyway, check out the Wayback Machine, both for fun, and as a web development reference. From their website:
"Browse through 30 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago."
Just type in a URL, choose one of the archived dates, and journey back through time. Very cool service. Those of you who are nostalgic for the old, pre-Dylan Macromedia website, knock yourselves out!
Posted by cantrell at July 2, 2004 09:19 AM | References
Comments
Wow! That really is a cool too! What a great way to do a reality check against what we remember as the "good old days".
Posted by: Paul Kenney at July 2, 2004 11:42 AM
I'll add that beyond the sheer trippy joy of looking at a given web site's evolution over time, there's also a practical aspect of this nifty tool. I often use it when I visit a page/site that either seems temporarily (or is permamently) no longer available.
There's even an available "bookmarklet" offered on the site that allows you to add a link to your browser's quicklinks so that while visiting a page, you can hit the bookmarklet link and it will try to find the current page's URL in the wayback machine archive.
Along with Google's "cached snapshot of page", these tools can help you find broken pages, old resources, past price lists, and lots more.
There's also a nifty "compare dates" feature that works a bit like Word's compare document feature, showing what words/phrases have changed between the two dates for a given page.
Posted by: Charlie Arehart at July 2, 2004 11:58 AM
Suggestion for future cool tool, http://www.colorschemer.com/ - Color Schemer Studio, very nice.
Posted by: Todd at July 7, 2004 11:05 AM