Tobis Timemachine is a very useful tool for bringing websites back to “the amateur web of 1996.”

However, there is is some overhead with the Timemachine: it requires your users to have already installed it in order to be useful, and those visitors need to be using a compatible version of Firefox. What if you want to make a 1996-era website for all your site’s visitors?

Thus, timemachine-fu, the Timemachine plugin for Rails.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on a Rails project where we’ve dropped ActiveRecord in favor of a CouchDB database.

One thing I miss from ActiveRecord, though, is the ability to do migrations. While SQL migrations in their most conventional use—to modify the schema of our database—are of course not needed in schemaless CouchDB databases, there is still sometimes a need to have a block of code which runs exactly once on every installation of our codebase. For example, we might have a key in our documents which becomes so important that we want to break its values off into new documents, or vice versa, we might have a bunch of documents which should all get combined into attributes of one master document.