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Plus feel good that some of your blog entries have been archived for the public, to be preserved and available into the future!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