DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - MAY 2020
SAVING WEBPAGES TO THE WAYBACK
MACHINE ON INTERNET ARCHIVE
Don's Freeware Corner articles are printed in the
UTAH VALLEY TECHNOLOGY AND GENEALOGY GROUP
(UVTAGG) Newsletter TAGGology each month and are
posted on his Class Notes Page https://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections and updates.
SAVING WEBPAGES TO THE WAYBACK MACHINE ON INTERNET ARCHIVE
©2020 Donald R. Snow - Last updated 2020-05-04.
INTERNET ARCHIVE AND THE WAYBACK MACHINE
Internet Archive is a free webpage that has the
goal of "saving all knowledge and making it
available for free". Its URL is https://archive.org/
and a Wikipedia article about it is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive
. It is supported entirely by donations and
has millions of items stored on it now, with more
being added every day. These include old
versions of websites stored in their WayBack
Machine. They started "crawling" the
internet in 1994, so you can find old versions of
webpages from then on. You type in the URL
in the search box for the WayBack Machine which is
near the center on the Internet Archive home
page. (See the image.)
And here's what they have for our
old webpages. Our URL in the early days was
uvpafug.org, so that's what I entered. The first screenshot shows
the dates they scanned our webpage and the second one shows what it
looked like on 8 Aug 2000, thir first scan of it.
The
scroll bar on the website in the first screenshot can be moved to the right to show all
scans up to the latest in 2020. The image for
9 Aug 2000 is the first one they stored, but our webpatge was up before that, of course, so it's not the first day of our website. Notice that they have
stored more than 300 scans our old webpage.
That's not our URL now, but that old URL is still used by our webmasters for testing, so it's still there and being scanned. We started the organization in about Jan 1991, so this was almost 10 years later. And I was involved with it from the beginning.
For
another example take a look at my own
webpage on 6 Mar 2012 by searching for
uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
. Times have changed, haven't
they?
Near the top of these old
versions of websites is a box with the date
and arrows left and right which take you to
previous or later scans of that webpage, so
you can follow what it looked like over
time. Since they don't always scan
everything, if you find a website that you
want to be sure they preserve in the WayBack
Machine, this article shows how to do it.
BROWSER EXTENSIONS
Extensions are add-on programs to accomplish tasks in browsers. The one
we are discussing today, Save To The WayBack Machine, is for the Chrome
browser and there may be similar extensions to do the ssame thing in other browsers. To use a browser extension you install it first and they are easy to install. You select the ones you want and when you install them, they put icons on your browser taskbar to click to run them.
INSTALLING THE CHROME EXTENSION SAVE TO
THE WAYBACK MACHINE
To install this extension on Chrome
click on the 3-vertical-dot icon in the
upper right corner of Chrome. Then
click on More Tools >
Extensions. That page shows the Chrome
extensions you already have installed.
To find the extension we want here, Save To
The Wayback Machine, click on the
"hambuirger" icon (the 3 horizontal bars in
the upper left corner), then click on Open
Chrome Web Store (lower left corner) and
search for "wayback machine" (without the
quotes). This finds two or three
extensions, so click on the one called Save
To The Wayback Machine. Click to add
it to your Chrome browser and it puts a
small Internet Archive icon in your Chrome
taskbar near the upper right side. If
you already have several extensions
installed, you may not see the Internet
Archive icon until you click on the
3-vertical-dots icon to open up more taskbar
space. When you hover your cursor over
the icon, it says Save To The Wayback
Machine.
USING THE CHROME EXTENSION
Once you have the extension installed in
Chrome, when you see a webpage that you want
to be sure is preserved in the WayBack
Machine, click on the extension icon to open
a short men. Note that you can
only save "static" webpages, not dynamically
produceed ones such as in FamilySearch when
you search for an individual.
Here is a screenshot of the Save To
The WayBack Machine short menu.
The short menu contains information such as the
last time that webpage was preserved, its
Archival History, and how many webpages you have
asked to be saved, yourself. I don't know
if there is a limit to the number pages an
individual can save, since they want to preserve
what people are interested in. Also, I
don't know if you have to be a member (free) of
Internet Archive to save webpages, since I am a
member and don't know if you can save them
without being one. The Archival History
shows a bar graph of every day that webpage was
saved and that could go back as far as 1994 when
they started. I noticed that several of my class
notes webpages have never been saved, probably
because they are fairly recent and Internet
Archive hasn't "crawled" them yet. I've
been clicking to save them to see if that
triggers saving them more often. It only
takes a second or two to save the webpage and it
asks if you want to view the saved page in the
WayBack Machine. BTW, I haven't found any way to save subpages, only the one you are on.
CONCLUSIONS
Remember the Internet Archive WayBack Machine when you are looking for a webpage that is
now gone from the internet or changed. Not all pages are
there, of course, but most are and they scan the
internet often enough that they get most of the
changes that are made to webpages. But to be sure they save the ones you want, install the extension and click on it when you see a good page to save. This has only been for the Chrome browser, but there are probably similar extensions for other browsers.