timemachine-fu, a Timemachine plugin for Rails
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.
Demonstration
PBCore Database before timemachine-fu:
and after:
Note that this static demonstration does not really show the full power of timemachine-fu: in actual installation, many of the images will be animated for further effect, and there are three stylesheets, one of which will be randomly selected for each page load. In addition, positioning of some of the images will be randomly determined anew on each page load, and one of the themes includes a MIDI file for your listening pleasure.
Use it in your own projects
timemachine-fu is provided as an easy-to-install Rails plugin. It is compatible with either Prototype, as provided by default with Rails, or with JQuery, if you’re using jrails.
You can get the code, see installation instructions, and do whatever else you want on GitHub.