Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Is Your Genealogy Blog in the Wayback Machine?










During #AncestryHour on Tuesday, participants discussed how to preserve digital info, including blog posts. Then someone came up with the bright idea to check the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

As shown above, my genealogy blog was saved 111 times in the past decade. (I began blogging in 2008 but the Wayback Machine apparently didn't save my posts for the first few years.)

Pick a date and click

I picked one of the dates in the timeline, and a calendar popped up, highlighting the days when my blog was saved as a snapshot in the Wayback Machine. If I click on a specific highlighted date, I can see exactly what my blog's home page looked like then. 

For instance, the image at right shows the top of my blog on November 24, 2011, Thanksgiving Thursday. 

The Wayback Machine also included in its snapshot that day's post and blog posts going back to November 2, 2011, all of which were visible on the home page. 

(This design shows what my blog looked like before I inserted ancestor landing pages and other elements.)

Try it, you'll like it

If you have a blog, do enter the URL in the Wayback Machine's search box and see how many times (and when) your blog was saved by this wonderful digital resource.

Then take a trip back in time by clicking to see what your blog looked like on that date.

Plus feel good that some of your blog entries have been archived for the public, to be preserved and available into the future!

"Preservation" is this week's #52Weeks genealogy challenge prompt from Amy Johnson Crow.

6 comments:

  1. Hmmmm, very interesting, never heard of it...so, reading up on it now. Thanks for the info! :)

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  2. This is a wonderful resource for so many reasons! Thank you for highlighting it.

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  3. I wonder what causes it to save some of the blog posts and not others? Mine was saved 135 times. Thanks for this!

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  4. Interesting story. I've heard of the Wayback Machine but never knew I could find my posts on the site. Thanks for sharing.

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  5. I have looked for my blog on the Wayback Machine previously, but it never hurts to read a reminder to check on it. The spiders have crawled my pages 103 times, starting in 2012. I began the blog in 2011, so it took about a year before my pages were indexed.

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  6. A few years ago we moved our father's blog to a new hosting site and lost some of the formatting. We used the Wayback machine to view how the site looked many years ago and were able to recreate the formatting as he had created it. Thanks for sharing this tip.

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