You know the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine? Well you should. The Archive has been saving webpages since 1996 (think like Google cached pages but better). You can search for any url and, if it’s a hit, see a snapshot of it in the past, often at several different times.

But there are lots of pages that they miss with their automated crawler. They do have manual help from librarians, but they can only do so much. Which is why it’s awesome that now they’ve provided a way for you to manually save pages! Now, if you bookmark a url but you’re worried it’ll be dead when you try to access it in a year or two, you can get peace of mind by using the “Save Page Now” feature on their homepage. Just like that, it’s archived for all posterity. (And really, don’t worry. They’re serious about sticking around. They even built a backup at the Library of Alexandria.)

But it’s a little inconvenient to keep going to their homepage and pasting in urls. Luckily, it’s simple to make a bookmarklet to automate it. Just bookmark this (in the “url” field of the bookmark), and click on it when you’re on a page you want to archive:

javascript:(function(){window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+document.location.href,'_blank')})()

First, it’ll search for any existing entries, and if you don’t find any, you’ll be able to save it yourself. Now go, and contribute to the preservation of culture!