You may have come across this one before - but it is quite interesting, if a total waste of time.

The 'wayback machine' at http://www.archive.org/ allows you to see the actual history and development of a website. The site tracks webpages and allows you to see the older versions - right back to 1996.

This can be a useful tool if you want to see how long a site has been around for. It obviously doesn't work perfectly - it tries to load images from the current website url, so if a site has changed dramatically most of the graphics won't be visible. I'm sure things like this will become more useful in the future - especially as the British Library is also keen on keeping records on digital content. Might also help us overcome problems of outdated technology.

Anyway - try it out - type in a website you know and literally track its history - the larger sites work best. Also remember it isn't always accurate as some sites redirect you to other places once you are at their main url.

Quite strange looking back at some of the designs that have been used on the sites linking to the forum. I had hoped that some of my own design failures had been consigned to the dustbin for evermore... clearly not!

Not a particulalry exhaustive list of returns for some sites, it's not noted about a dozen updates on my own site, but still a very interesting tool.

No, as you say, it isn't perfect. I don't know how they register updates to a site. Perhaps it does a sweep every so often. It has missed a few incarnations of my own. This is largely due to the fact that I have an 'intelligent' redirect. If you visit the homepage using Internet Explorer - which 94% of my visitors do, you access the main home page. If you use another browser, such as Netscape or Opera, you a redirected to more compatible home page (without the rollover links etc.) The tracker for the wayback machine must use tools other than Internet Explorer as it only picks up the 'other' homepage.

Amazing tool though - a record of development of most internet pages.

Don't do yourself down either Dan - all your versions have looked great. I even remember the blue one - the machine doesn't seem to.

The blue one was the first! Mr. Field goes to the top of the class for retention of knowledge.

I think that that version may have predated the purchase of the domain name though, certainly it was the one I had on the Geocities site.