Broken Link? Check The Way Back Machine!

Turns out, there's a Time Machine for the World Wide Web!  It's called "The Way Back Machine" and it's a reasonable chronological archive of crawl-able websites.

microsoft.com in 1998, the earliest archived copy of the site.

Imagine you're using the 'Net to answer some question (random example: "In Ruby, what the heck does class << self; self end do?") and you find this link to what all the surrounding text seems to indicate is an articulate explanation.  With great anticipation, you click!  ...only to find... a co-ed :-/

rubygarden.org on September 21, 2013.  Cute chick, but not what I was looking for...

Something just like this happened to me, this morning.  I was reviewing the Singleton pattern syntax in Ruby in some of my old notes which included a reference to the Ruby Garden.  This was a wiki that David Black, Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer were maintaining back in the day, until it was overrun with spam.

Alas! While I was not able to find the page I was looking for, a trove of other useful parts of the wiki are safely tucked away in the Way Back Machine archive!

The RubyIdioms page in the rubygarden.org wiki on September 14, 2007

The next time you hit a broken link and it breaks your heart, remember you can rekindle the flame at the Way Back Machine!