MobileRatty: How to find out when a web page was last updated J. D. Biersdorfer will sort you out in a New York Times minute

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How to find out when a web page was last updated J. D. Biersdorfer will sort you out in a New York Times minute

2008-01-03 14:01:00 by bookofjoe in bookofjoe

Ms. Biersdorfer's weekly Times Q&A about computer-based technology is usually about a million miles over my head.

Every now and then, though, she drops a pearl even a TechnoDolt™ can use.

Today's item is very cool, and follows.
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"If you have a sneaking suspicion that the Web page you're looking at is old and stale, you can take a peek to see when it was last updated. In Internet Explorer or Firefox, just go to the address bar while the page is displayed and type in "javascript:alert(document.lastModified)" without the quotation marks. Hit the Enter key to see a box [top] that tells you when the page you're viewing was updated."
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Full disclosure: I'm so stupid it took me a couple tries to do it successfully.

At first I typed in "javascript:alert(document.lastModified)" after www.bookofjoe.com in the address bar.

After that didn't work I tried just "javascript:alert(document.lastModified)" and bingo, there it was.

In my (admittedly weak) defense, I do believe Ms. Biersdorfer might have deigned to consider those of us at the bottom of the technology food chain and noted that we should first empty the address bar before typing in the magic characters.

But I quibble too much, I fear.