Industrial Hypertext

Industrial Strength Web Sites for Perth, Western Australia

Wayback Machine Bookmarklet

One of my favourite features of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer is the ability to see a cached snapshot of a web page that is currently down. This has reduced the frustration no end when researching information on the web.

As if Google's cached snapshot feature wasn't useful enough, the Wayback Machine goes one louder and lets you see cached versions of a web site up to 1996. As an example Yahoo's homepage from October 20th, 1996.

As soon as I found the Wayback Machine I wanted a button on my browser to view previous versions of a web page I was looking at. But the only toolbar I could find that offered this was the Alexa Toolbar which as of June 1st, 2002 seems to have some serious privacy implications.

ALEXA'S TOOLBAR SERVICE COLLECTS AND STORES INFORMATION ABOUT THE WEB PAGES YOU VIEW, THE DATA YOU ENTER IN ONLINE FORMS AND SEARCH FIELDS, AND, WITH VERSIONS 5.0 AND HIGHER, THE PRODUCTS YOU PURCHASE ONLINE WHILE USING THE TOOLBAR SERVICE. http://www.alexa.com/help/privacy.html?p=Corp_W_t_40_L2

So I thought I would build my own button on the toolbar using a bookmarklet . A bookmarklet is a just a URL bookmark (favourite in IE ) that contains Javascript that runs when you click it.

By placing bookmarklets on the browser's links bar you can effectively extend your browser with little Javascript programs. By creating a bookmarklet with the following Javascript you can view previous versions of the current page in your browser:

javascript:window.location="http://web.archive.org/web/*/"+window.location;

Installing the bookmarklet

To install the bookmarklet either bookmark the following link, or better yet drag the following link onto your links toolbar.

Wayback Machine Bookmarklet

IE will issue a security warning when adding links that contain Javascript, but bookmarklets are usually quite safe.

How it works

This bookmarklet works by constructing a URL from the Wayback Machine's URL and the browser's location. It's very easy to build other bookmarklets which can perform other tasks by constructing urls based on the browser's location.
For example here's a bookmarklet that shows similar pages for a URL you are visiting.

javascript:window.location="http://www.google.com/search?q=related:"+window.location;

Google Similar Pages Bookmarklet

More on bookmarklets

There are quite a few bookmarklet sites on the web:

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