Palimpsest

About this project

Palimpsest is a web application for exploring how websites change over time. It uses the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to retrieve a site's snapshot history, removes consecutive snapshots that contain no meaningful change, and presents the remaining history through an interactive timeline.

The interesting part is how the changes are detected. Rather than comparing archived pages as raw text, the backend parses each page into a DOM tree and compares structured elements such as headings, paragraphs, links, images, and list items. This makes it possible to distinguish meaningful additions, removals, and edits from superficial differences in formatting or page structure.

Archived pages are rendered in sandboxed iframes with scripts removed, while SQLite stores notes and cached snapshots. An optional Claude-powered Insight panel can also research the surrounding context of a detected change, connecting the structural difference in an archived page with information from the wider web.