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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for October 4th, 2023

Bookmarklet to navigate from a page to the most recent saved WayBack machine entry

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/04

A while ago, while writing last weeks post XPath based bookmarklets for Archive.is: more JavaScript fiddling!, I needed the most recent WayBack Machine archival of

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath/Introduction_to_using_XPath_in_JavaScript

I vaguely remembered replacing the normal timestamp with a 3 and 13 zeros, so I tried this

https://web.archive.org/web/30000000000000/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath/Introduction_to_using_XPath_in_JavaScript

And indeed, it did a HTTP 302 redirect to

https://web.archive.org/web/20220312161117/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath/Introduction_to_using_XPath_in_JavaScript

So I quickly made this bookmarklet:

javascript:location.href='https://web.archive.org/web/30000000000000/'+document.location.href;

Then I created another one for getting the screenshot:

javascript:location=location.href.replace(/^https:\/\/web\.archive\.org\/save\/http/,'https://web.archive.org/web/30000000000000/http://web.archive.org/screenshot/http')

That works for screenshots archived with a Wayback Machine account, as these are related because of the inserted http://web.archive.org/screenshot/ fragment:

Since the Wayback Machine always looks for the closest savet timestamp, it does not matter the timestamps in these archived pages have a slight mismatch.

Memory lane

20231006: I edited this section referring two prior blog posts instead of one because of [Wayback/Archive] pbeccard: “@wiert @oliof You can also use…” – Mastodon (clearly showing that Mastodon like any social media platform does mangle backtick quoted code):

@wiert @oliof You can also use `javascript:location.href=’web.archive.org/web/*/’+docume to get the overview. I find this quite useful since I often want an older version of a page.

And later in the reply chain:

[Wayback/Archive] pbeccard: “@wiert @oliof Ah, I thought b…” – Mastodon

@wiert @oliof Ah, I thought by now that maybe Markdown is supported. I pulled the bookmarklet out of my bookmarklet bookmark folder. Here is a copy: https://gist.github.com/corppneq/d61e3…

[Wayback/Archive] Gist: Bookmarklets

I also found back two blog posts:

  1. Need to write a proper bookmarklet for the wayback archive (: mentioning many useful Wayback Machine JavaScript Bookmarklets from my gist [Wayback/Archive] Ideas/inspiration for writing a proper WayBack archive.org bookmarklet including this one:

    [Wayback/Archive] http://www.gyford.com/misc/wayback.html

      • WayBack:

        javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+document.location.href;
        

    I also archived this referred page: [Wayback/Archive] Bookmarklets.com – What’s New.

  2. JavaScript bookmarklet to replace part of the WayBack machine URL with a bookmarklet replacing

    JavaScript bookmarklet to replace part of the WayBack machine URL:

    A bookmarklet that goes to the latest rendered saved version (sometimes saved versions have not been rendered yet, so you get the latest available render):

    javascript:location=location.href.replace(/^https:\/\/web\.archive\.org\/save\/http/,'https://web.archive.org/web/30000000000000/http')

    The WayBack Machine uses a 14-position ID and tries to find the render that is the most close by. This is the format of the ID:

    yyyymmddhhmmss

    This is granular enough, as the WayBack machine only allows new saves that are usually 30+ minutes apart.

    (Note that period by now seems to be increased from 30+ minutes to 45+ minutes)

It also found back this post having the same huge number: 0.30000000000000004.com. How cool is WordPress search (:

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, Internet, InternetArchive, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, WayBack machine, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »