23. Cache. An Invaluable Internet Currency.

(This is a continuation of my 5 part post  20. I Wanted to Make My Own Mistakes, Until I realized that It Was Much Easier to Let Others Screw Up. )ÂÂ

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When getting help from Meller Time on the IRC, he made three great suggestions that both had to do with Cache. At first when you are told to check the cash, you wonder “what does checking my wallet have to do with finding my lost files?”, then you learn that cache is like the historical memory of the Internet. Internet servers and our computers in a sense keep a list of all the places we have been and in the cache it keeps a complete picture. Similar to the way we see a childhood friend in their 30’s and still remember how they looked at 10.

The first cache resource was the waybackmachine, I had known about this one from Alexa. Its quite neat. You put in the URL and if the waybackmachine has a cache of the site it will show you the entire history of it. It is cool to see how sites like Google and Amazon looked in the beginning.
I tried it out for my blog but it was still too new to be tracked by it.

Then next cache resource was Google cache. This is a feature Google offers. in the Google search box you type cache:www.yourwebsite.com and this will take you to a past view of your site. When I did this the only thing I found was my main page. But then Meller Time showed me something really cool. You find site links on your page, copy the URL and then add that after the cache: . Well after about 1hr of following cached links I had found most of my posts and comments. There were only about six left.

The third place was suggested by Jason and Meller Time. They suggested I check the cache in Internet Explorer and FireFox. You do that by looking in the History folders. For IE you go to View/Explorer Bar/History, for FireFox its View/Side Bar/History. You click on the links in the folders and they bring up the pages from the cache. Anyway IE was not an option since I had emptied my Temporary Internet and History folders, but I found five more of my post in the FireFox cache. Jason suggested that I ask readers to check their caches for the remaining post.

The last post I found the next day by checking Google cache again. Jason said that Google updates every few days.

The other interesting thing that you can do with cache. If you are searching on Google and you get a result that give you an error page, you can click on the cached page option at the bottom of the search result and it will give you the historical page.

In Closing.

24. Did I Mention “BACKUP!”

 Or you can check out the other posts in the series.

21. Often Your Best Resource for Lost Web Data Is Your Host.

22. Accessing The Minds Of Technical Wizards.

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