ReadWriteWeb

That invaluable Internet spelunker's friend, the Wayback Machine, which allows users access to websites that have long since passed their sell-by date, has undergone a gamma-ray powered transmogrification. Well, they redesigned it and it's now in open beta.

The new version is two-fold; first, it's a wholesale migration of the site from a proprietary software to an open source platform, which should make the whole thing faster; second, there are interface changes that make it easier to be more precise in your digital time traveling.

The Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento, a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).