The History Button

Imagine the agony. You saw it yesterday. It was great. The complete works of Shakespeare, all online, in a downloadable easy-to-read format. There they were. All of a sudden the phone rings. Someone’s at the door. Your macaroni is boiling over. The inevitable happens and it drags you away from the screen. But you bookmarked it, right? Whoops. You knew you forgot something.

It’s happened to all of us. A few key words are right on the tip of your tongue, but they just won’t surface. You could plug them into a search engine if you could only remember what they were!

Your History button on your browser is here for such purposes as these. It keeps track (so you don’t have to) of precisely what sites you’ve been to in the allotted time. The default for Internet Explorer is 20 days. This means that your browser, unbeknownst to you, is keeping of log of EVERY site you’ve been to in the past 20 days. Have you ever wondered how your browser keeps your visited links a different color from those you haven’t visited?

So what exactly does this mean? If you know anything at all about the site you are looking for, there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to find it with the History button. Click the button labeled “History” (Netscape users – Go to the Communicator menu and click on History).

Both browsers give you a standard choice of options at this point. If you know what exact day you found the site, in Internet Explorer you can hop right over to all the sites you visited on a certain day. Or, in both browsers, you can display sites that are most visited by you. If that still doesn’t help, you can flat-out search for what you are looking for (ie. “Shakespeare”).

This usually does the trick for me! “If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not. “ – Ibid

With the History button, you can look into the seeds of time and find that Shakespeare page you thought was long gone.