The Situation
As a web developer at NYU Libraries, I get to participate in all kinds of projects. I manage well established open source repositories, maintain our apps, create tools for better day-to-day workflows, and fix all kinds of little bugs (while accidentally creating some along the way). Recently, there was a small issue that required me to investigate why our footer didn't look like how it was supposed to.
Mind you, I am relatively new to my position, and I usually don't pay attention to footers in my day-to-day life. This got me thinking, how is this footer supposed to look like anyway? Likewise, no one really knew when this happened, so I didn't want to spend minutes hours looking through commits in a monolith repo I'm not very well aquainted with. So I revisited one of my favorite free online resources: The Wayback Machine!
The Wayback Machine
Managed by the non-profit Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine is an essential tool for anyone who is interested in the digital curation of the web. It's an massive catalogue of billions of web pages, with frequent stashing of updates for a fully interactive (and reliable) experience. And honestly, sometimes it's kind of fun to scroll back and see what web pages looked like in 2010.
Spoiler alert, they did not look great.
The Solution
Regardless, I went to the website that had the issues and went back a little bit too far. Which, fun for personal reasons but not exactly what I needed. After a bit of tinkering in the dates, voilà! Right what I needed.
Apparently, the bullet points are a no-go and there should be some kind of dotted line in between each list item. Thankfully, since it is fully interactive, I can actually see exactly what CSS styles was missing in ours.
So, now... why wasn't that appearing in our version? And then I saw the key: our footer <ul> didn't have the .list class anymore. So in the end, it was an easy fix. And I could go on the rest of my day, and celebrate my catch with a hot lavender tea.
Conclusion
Work smarter, not harder. Or something like that.
...OK, real conclusion
Use free resources! By using these online archives, you participate in one of the biggest communities of free information available in current times. And, you get the added bonus of getting distracted with uncool websites from the mid-2000s.
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