#wassup — Public Fediverse posts

Today’s #WASSUP tip: a search shortcut for looking up pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Ever click on a link for an article or photo and it’s not found (404), or redirects to a home page, or otherwise is not what you expect?

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archives webpages (that allow it) and quite often you can lookup broken links in the archive.

I often do this by typing "https://web.archive.org/web/" into the browser address bar and then pasting the link I want to lookup, because I know some of the Internet Archive’s URL patterns.

Though it’s not really a “search engine”, I realized I could use the search engine shortcuts feature of Firefox to simplify this greatly.

Here’s how to create a search shortcut for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:

1. open Firefox Preferences ("Firefox" menu, "Preferences" item)
2. select "🔍 Search" from the left column
3. click the [ + Add search engine ] button
4. enter "Internet Archive" into the Search engine name field (without quotes)
5. enter "https://web.archive.org/web/%s" into the URL field (without quotes)
6. enter "ia" into the Keyword field (without quotes)

Now if a link I follow fails to load (404) or is otherwise broken, I can:

1. copy that link (I may have to go back to the previous page and right-click choose "Copy Link")
2. activate the browser address bar (cmd-L does this in Firefox and Safari)
3. type "ia " (without the quotes)
4. paste the link I had copied earlier, and press return

Presto, an Internet Archive result for that link.

If you’re a frequent user of the Wayback Machine, hopefully this will save you some time.

And if not, try it anyway for the next time you click on a link and it seems broken.

This is my fifth #WASSUP #WASSUP2026 post, and third useful web tip for September.

#InternArchive #WaybackMachine #search #searchShortcut #Firefox #FirefoxSearch #searchEngine #archive #archives #PageNotFound #404 #404Error #Error404 #tip #webTip #browserTip #webBrowserTip #searchTip

Welcome to September! Time for a new blogging challenge for the month. After some ideation, here’s my proposed September blogging challenge, on topics I find myself reading and posting about, with an emphasis on pragmatism:

The Web And Standards September Useful Posts blogging challenge

Or the #WASSUP challenge for short.

I really enjoyed the #Blaugust blogging challenge last month (31 posts ✅ — summary in another post), and not feeling a resonance with the two prior September challenges noted on the IndieWeb wiki, decided to come up with my own. Iterated on some ideas yesterday until arriving at WASSUP (yes, as a backronym, inspired somewhat by WHATWG which also has WHATNOT and WHATUP meetings).

Topic:
* Anything *useful* (features, tips) about open web standards, the open web as a whole, web browsers, or web services like search engines.

Hashtags:
* #WASSUP #WASSUP2026

Similar to Blaugust:
* Overall goal: 30 posts during the month of September (1 per day if you wish, or double/triple-up to get ahead or catch-up)

UPDATE: Awards for numbers of posts:
* 1 ⭐️ Starter. Congrats on starting the challenge!
* 5 ✨ Weekly Tipster. Post once per week, or at least 5 times for the duration.
* 8 🕸 Weekends Weaver. Post every weekend day, or at least that same number, 8 times.
  (Thanks to James for this suggestion!)
* 22 ❇️ Weekdays Wizard. Post every weekday, or at least that same number, 22 times.
* 30 💠 Superbly Useful. Post at least 30 times during the month.
All self-assessed and self-acknowledged. Use the award name, emoji, or both!

And that’s it.

If those are topics you already blog about, great, join in using the hashtags and share what you find useful about them!

Otherwise, take a look at how you frequently use the Web, and post what you have found useful, especially the most useful for you.

Blog clever tips about how you have made better use of the Web, web browsers, search engines etc.

If you’re a web developer or designer, share what you find most useful about web standards, your choice, either in their entirety or of individual features, like HTML elements, attributes, CSS properties, Selectors, DOM features, WebAPIs, standard media formats on the web, etc.

Let’s see what positive pragmatic things we can share with each other about the web and how it works in practice.

Glossary:

Blaugust:
* https://indieweb.org/Blaugust
blogging challenge:
* https://indieweb.org/blogging_challenge
September blogging challenges:
* https://indieweb.org/September#Challenges
standards
* https://indieweb.org/standards

#blog #blogging #bloggingChallenge #September #web #openWeb #webStandards #openWebStandards #webDev #webDevs #webDeveloper #webDevelopers #webDesign #webDesigns #webDesigner #webDesigners #useful #pragmatic

This is post 20 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #indieweb

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