When surfing the web in general, is there a way to find out when a site/page was first published without depending on the author's given information?


MLA papers require that website sources be dated according to when they were first published or last updated, but my particular source does not give either. It is an official university-sponsored page, not some random unreliable person's thoughts. Right-clicking for page properties only brings up the current day's date. I'll still consult my handbook to see if there's a 'no date' provision, but it would be useful to date a site anyway. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

-Cad

I'm so disappointed. I expected this to be a testimonial for mmodating.com. :(

Lol, I thought about possible ways to name this thread but.. whatever I thought of, it gave the same image. :rolleyes:

sigh.. so much for finding cyber fun here :(

Cados, I would try emailing the webmaster and asking him when the site was originally put up. Also, you might try looking for copyright footnotes.

Before I posted this (forgot to mention it earlier), I did e-mail the author but he only told me the year it appeared in one of his play's performance playbills (I do not want to cite it as a playbill entry, not to mention I don't even have enough info to do that). I suppose I'll just use that year, but again he only told me the year w/o any month or day. My MLA handbook says nothing about changing the date format to just year or even no date. Also, there is no copyright info on the bottom of the page as would be expected.

EDIT: Will a mod please change the title of my thread to the title of my first post? My edit up there didn't seem to affect the thread link. Thanks!

So what's the page URL?

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cmazer/mis1.html

http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index.jhtml

or

www.whois.net

Both of those usualy can give you some background info about owners of websites and etc.

http://www.cox-internet.com/dogood/images/Shawpage.png

No idea on creation, but there is the last modified date ( most cases that's pulled from the time stamp on the file itself and since this is a really simple html page, that is pretty accurate ).

Fil

Looks like it's written by a professor there. I'd email him and ask. cmazer@english.upenn.edu

Thank you all for your help, that date Filatal gave me will suffice. I actually did e-mail him Sanchek, but (see above) he only gave me the original hardcopy publish date and only the year at that. Again, thanks everyone!

Fil... How did you get to that window?

That's a Netscape feature it seems.

Netscape->right click->page info.

Fil

Get the same info in any mozilla based browser (FireFox, etc). I'm not entirely sure how much I trust those modified dates though.

May very well be correct. We can narrow it down to May 11, 1997 or earlier:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cmazer/mis1.html