← Liam Newmarch

Carbon Date for jQuery

2020 edit: This project has been discontinued. It was a fun idea, but never really useful.

Occasionally when I’m browsing the web I want to know how old a website is.

Maybe it does something awesome and innovative. Maybe it's terrible and due a redesign. Whatever the reason, it'd be useful to know how old the site is. The trouble is unless the author explicitly puts a date on the site, there often isn't a good way to age it.

Unless they use jQuery.

See, web developers generally grab the latest jQuery version and don’t update it. By looking at the version number (specifically in jQuery.fn.jquery) we can approximate the date of the last build / redesign.

Carbon date is a tiny tool that does just that.

Get the bookmarklet

Carbon date is a bookmarklet – to use it drag the following link to your bookmark toolbar:

Carbon date (Sorry!)

If you'd like to see the (tiny) unminified source or would like to report have a bug, you can find the project on GitHub.

Happy dating!