A friend recently asked about the Women at Home University website. (For those of you who are not familiar, WAHU is not an actual, degree-granting university, but a suggested list of resources for learning about a wide variety of home and family skills.) When I went to look it back up, I discovered that the site is apparently defunct – but I was able to find it using one of my favorite fall-back tools: the internet archive.
It’s been around for long enough that I guess I figured everyone knew about it, but apparently not everyone does, so let me share this wonderful tool with you. 🙂 The internet archive is a project that seeks to archive every page on the internet. (You can opt out if you object, but this is such an amazing public service that I can’t imagine why you would want to unless the content of your site is private or restricted in some way. They don’t take credit for your content – just save a “snapshot” of it – and as far as I’m aware, they don’t make money off of it or anything. It’s just like having a copy of an out-of-print book stored in a library.) What this means is that when you mourn the loss of that great, informative site, you can take heart – you may still be able to scrounge up the information.
Head over to the internet archive at www.archive.org. Type the address of the defunct website into the “wayback machine” search box, and see what comes up. Chances are, there’s an archived copy of the page available. Now, site functionality (forms and other interactive features) will not be available, and images are hit-or-miss. But I’ve almost always found the basic information preserved intact.
(Go ahead and try it out. Look up www.womenathomeuniversity.org.) The internet archive definitely works for me!
Great tip! I’ve heard about the wayback machine but never knew exactly how to find it.