About

The Rhubarb Compendium was a labour of love by Dan Eisenreich, started in 1994 and tended for three decades across three platforms (hand-written HTML on FreeServers, a Drupal site, and finally a Blogger blog). It collected recipes, growing advice, varieties, history, medicinal lore, and the kind of folk knowledge that only accretes when one person tends one corner of the web for a long time.

After 2024-10-23 the rhubarbinfo.com domain stopped serving the site and is now a casino-redirect squat. This is a non-commercial preservation effort, rebuilt page-by-page from Internet Archive snapshots.

License

The Rhubarb Compendium is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License (CC BY-SA 3.0 US) — the license Dan applied to the site himself. That license explicitly permits redistribution, including commercially, provided the work is attributed and shared under the same terms. This rescue follows that license:

• Attribution: every page links back to its original URL on rhubarbinfo.com and the Wayback snapshot it was rebuilt from.
• Share-alike: the rescued content is published here under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 US license.

From Dan's own words on the original about page:

I have found many recipes on the internet that are marked with a copyright notice. A word about copyright of recipes from the US copyright office:

… "Several categories of material are generally not eligible for statutory copyright protection. These include among others: […] Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices" …

It seems clear to me that recipes (regardless of their origin) are "procedures, methods, or processes" and as such you are free to copy and use the recipes included in this document (or anywhere else for that matter) as you see fit.

How it was rebuilt

• The Wayback CDX API was used to enumerate every captured URL on rhubarbinfo.com with HTTP 200 status before 2024-10-24.
• For each unique URL the latest pre-cutoff snapshot was fetched via web.archive.org/web/<ts>id_/<url> — the id_ flag returns the unmodified original bytes.
• HTML was parsed and converted to Markdown, preserving body content while stripping site-chrome and CMS infrastructure.
• Off-site images (Blogger CDN) were re-fetched via Wayback's closest-snapshot API, with a fall-back to the live CDN, and re-hosted alongside the text.
• SEO spam injected into compromised Drupal nodes around 2010-2012 was filtered out at extraction time. The full pipeline lives in tools/ in the source repository — the rescue is reproducible.

Three eras

• Static (1994-2006) — hand-written HTML hosted on FreeServers / Tripod. The original incarnation.
• Drupal (~2007-2018) — "The Rhubarb Compendium" on Drupal, with deep recipe taxonomy and category pages.
• Blogger (2019-2024) — the final incarnation. Cleaner long-form articles and the most recent edits, likely a clean restart away from the by-then-compromised Drupal install.

Contact

If you are Dan, family of Dan, or otherwise hold rights to this content and would like attribution updated, the rescue tweaked, or anything removed: please open an issue at github.com/maphew/rhubarb.