As I dig through and repost the archives of J’s Notes I’m finding a ton of dead links because twenty plus years is a LOOOOOONG time on the Internet and things go away. But thanks to the Wayback Machine you can find a lot of lost digital history with a quick search. But cut and pasting each link into a search is tedious, so maybe there’s a way to shortcut with a bookmark that has a little code to do the work for me.
So let’s ask ChatGPT!
After a little tweaking, some testing, minor back and forth with ChatGPT, and a total of 15 minutes, the following code did the trick:
javascript:(function() {
var currentUrl = window.location.href;
window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/' + currentUrl, '_blank');
})();To use:
- Create a new bookmark in your browser.
- Edit the bookmark’s URL field.
- Copy and paste the code above into the URL field.
- Give the bookmark a name (e.g. “Find Archive.org Cache”).
- Save the bookmark.
Sure, I probably could have just Googled this, but even some of those answers didn’t work when testing afterwards. And using ChatGPT and working through the process helped me learn a thing or two about life, love, and javascript. It got the process started a lot quicker than if I’d tried to do this from scratch and I was able to get to iteration right away.
And this is where I think the true value of ChatGPT is (right now at least). Rough first drafts that you can then edit and build off of and make your own. I wouldn’t recommend it for “original” content — because it’s not original, it’s aggregated and filtered from other people’s work — but for non-proprietary work or learning the basics of something it can go a long way to saving some time and effort.