Tuesday, January 6, 2009

"Florida Grapes" website gone?

I was just clicking through my links, and I found two of them that don't work, which is always a bummer. One of them, Rare Fruit Online, is at least still available through Archive.org (you can find it here) but the Florida Grapes website appears to have disappeared along with AOL's Hometown web service back in October, and isn't archived on Archive.org. Nor does it appear to be in the Google cache. (If you'd like to see it not working yourself, click here).

This is a major sadness for a pedigree junkie like me, because the site was a great source for parent information, particularly the selections from the programs of two of the "Three Bobs", Dunstan and Zehnder.

From my contacts within the grape breeding community, I feel fairly certain that that information is still preserved somewhere out there. But still, it's one thing for information to be available somewhere in some one's notebooks or spreadsheets, and another for it to be one Google search away.

If anybody has the pedigree information from this site, I'd try to put it online somewhere myself.

For now, I'm pulling both links from the sidebar. (As a condolence, I'm adding the Bananas.org forums).