Phillip Mendonça-Vieira, a web developer and self-described "chief exporter of awesome," accidentally saved a screenshot of The New York Times home page every half hour from September 2010 to July 2011. The estimated 12,000 images gave him the idea to chronicle this particularly epic year in the news with a time-lapse video.  Mendonça-Vieira makes a terrific point about preserving the memory of these home page layouts on his blog and how most newspaper websites don't store webpage layouts at any given time. "This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions," Mendonça-Vieira says. "They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period."

The full speed time-lapse makes it hard to see anything but the site's ads, but a frame-by-frame reading makes for a fascinating, however time-consuming trip down news memory lane. Of course, as we pointed out on Friday, everything is better in time-lapse.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Adam Clark Estes