Simon Willison’s Weblog

Personal web proxies

9th December 2002

Les Orchard is considering building his own web proxy. I had never thought about the possibilities of these technologies beyond caching before, but Les’s post has really got me thinking. I often find myself searching around for a web page I visited a few months ago and can only vaguely remember—a proxy generated searchable history (I never got the hang of using my browser’s) would be a very useful tool. In addition, the ability to cache local copies of useful documents to preserve them should the original ever go offline would be very handy. How about a proxy with an accompanying small GUI desktop application which shows your recent browsing history (the last 15 pages or so) and allows you to mark documents for bookmarking / preserving? The application and proxy server could communicate via XML-RPC.