Oh, hallelujah.
A few months ago, when I switched my blog to WordPress and also to a new hosting service, I somehow lost the first six months of my blog entries, from January to June 2001. They’d been made with Blogger, so they’d been in a separate directory from everything else, and somehow I’d forgotten to save that directory when switching servers. Six months’ worth of verbal creations and personal history, now completely lost, broken down into random ones and zeroes and scattered irretrievably throughout the universe. All those words and musings… gone.
But no!
I just went to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — and it’s all there. All six months of it! So I’ve saved it all to my computer and soon I’ll put it back into the archives on my site. My world will be complete again.
I can also revisit my old site design from a few years and a few site designs ago.
I love the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine, friend of the little man and the big company alike. I will always remember how blown away my coworkers at Microsoft.com were when I showed them the archives of the corporate home page, and how much things had changed.
I also like going back and finding my very first web site, which was served from my old Power Mac over our DSL line, on an (illicit) fixed IP address.