The Rhubarb Compendium — archive rescue

A preservation rebuild of www.rhubarbinfo.com, a 30-year labour of love by Dan Eisenreich (1994–2024) whose domain went dark on 2024-10-23 and is now a casino redirect. Every page here is a clean re-render of an Internet Archive snapshot.

The original site was published under CC BY-SA 3.0 US — this rescue follows the same license, with attribution and Wayback links preserved on every page.

Layout

Path	Purpose
tools/	Python pipeline: enumerate → filter → download → extract → fetch images → rewrite
raw/	Raw HTML/asset bytes downloaded from Wayback (gitignored)
content/	Extracted Markdown + frontmatter, organized by collection (canonical corpus)
public/_assets/	Re-fetched external images (Blogger CDN) — served as Astro static files
src/	Astro site (layouts, pages, content config)

The content/ tree is the canonical preserved corpus: portable, future-proof, re-renderable with any static-site generator. Astro is just the current renderer.

Rebuilding the corpus from scratch

# 1. enumerate every captured URL via Wayback CDX API
python3 tools/01_pick_snapshots.py
# 2. split into HTML / asset / skip buckets
python3 tools/02_filter.py
# 3. download raw bytes via Wayback id_ flag (no archive injection)
python3 tools/03_download.py raw/ --all
# 4. parse HTML → Markdown + frontmatter (era-aware: blogger/drupal/static)
python3 tools/04_extract.py
# 5. fetch off-site images (Blogger CDN) via Wayback closest-snapshot
python3 tools/05_fetch_external_images.py
# 6. rewrite Markdown image refs to point at /public/_assets/
python3 tools/06_rewrite_images.py

Building & deploying

npm install
npm run dev                    # local preview
npm run build:ghpages          # build for https://maphew.github.io/rhubarb/
npm run build:fly              # build for https://rhubarb.fly.dev/

GitHub Pages deploys via .github/workflows/deploy.yml on push to main.

For Fly.io, serve dist/ with any static container (flyctl launch with nginx/caddy works fine).

What's preserved, what isn't

Preserved:

• Recipes, articles, growing guides, varieties pages, taxonomy listings.
• Hero images and inline photography (Blogger CDN, re-hosted locally).
• Original URLs and archive timestamps on every page (attribution).

Skipped:

• Forum posts (per project scope).
• Drupal/Blogger UI chrome (sidebars, navigation, ads).
• Amazon-affiliate bookstore link blocks (the books still exist; the affiliate IDs are dead).
• The atomicrhubarb.rhubarbinfo.com subdomain (separate side-project, not part of the Compendium).

Attribution

All credit for the original content belongs to the original author(s) of www.rhubarbinfo.com. This rescue effort exists to keep the work findable. If you are the original author and would like attribution updated or content removed, please open an issue.

License

• Pipeline code (tools/, src/) — see the repository's LICENSE.
• Preserved content (content/, public/_assets/) — by Dan Eisenreich, redistributed here under the original CC BY-SA 3.0 US license that he applied to the site.