It’s been interesting to see what our first users value in Perpetually.  When we started our focus was entirely on capturing the web at a moment in time and reflecting it back for the user exactly as it was, HTML, CSS and all.

But in the last couple weeks a bunch of folks asked to see screenshots of their archives, in addition to full-text searching and browsing.  Since we were already taking these screenshots for visual browsing, this was an easy feature to add.

We’ve added a link in the header of each record, and in search results, to a full-page beautiful screenshot:

We also want to guarantee that URLs in Perpetually are permanent, and can thus be reliably referenced forever.  So, if you’re looking at The White House from September 8, 2009 the URL is:

_{http://perpetually.com/200909080000/http://www.whitehouse.gov/}

And to see the screenshot of that same record, just add ‘screenshot’ as a prefix:

_{http://perpetually.com/screenshot/200909080000/http://www.whitehouse.gov/}