Going Wayback

In a recent post on my GenAus blog I lamented that I had not kept files of all the websites I had developed over my 20 years on the World Wide Web. Quick as a flash one of my readers, Kylie Willison, reminded me of The Wayback Machine from The Internet Archive. Why didn't I think of that?

Wikipedia describes the Wayback machine thus "The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three dimensional index.".

So taking on Kylie's suggestion I tried to fins some of my old sites in the Archive but didn't have much luck as the search requires a URL and I couldn't remember the exact URLs of my sites. I'll have to go through some old emails and files and see if I can find them.

What I did remember was the URL for my GeniAus blog. Entering that in the Wayback Machine I discovered that it had first been captured by The Wayback Machine in January 2011 and had been "Saved 53 times between January 27, 2011 and September 5, 2015".  I often play around wiht the design and layout of my blog but forget to take a screenshot before I make changes. I intend going through all of those 53 captures and creating a personal archive of my blog changes. My blog is also captured by The Pandora Archive from The National Library of Australia so it should be accessible via one of these platforms for a long time to come.

First capture of the GeniAus blog by The Wayback Machine.

I wondered about my family site and found that "http://www.geniaus.net  has been "Saved 72 times between July 20, 2009 and October 2, 2015". Ain't that grand.

Of course, when I started writing this post my mind turned to the Worldwide Genealogy Blog and I thought I'd see what I could find in The Wayback Machine. I discovered that it has been "Saved 13 times between February 9, 2014 and September 6, 2015.

Here is the very first screenshot.

First capture of Worldside Genealogy Blog to The Wayback Machine

The post from February 9th about using Evernote for family history was from Diane Hewson in Australia.

Have you checked The Wayback Machine to see if your sites or blogs are being archived?