New to cheesemaking hobby

[Shlomi]

Hi all, I am Shlomi, currently living in San Jose, California. In the last year or so I got interested in cheesemaking and got Caldwell's basic cheesemaking book which is lovely, informative and quite easy to follow. I already made lots of buttermilk and yogurt (wife and kids love them!), and also made ricotta, paneer, fromage blanc, labane, quick mozzarella and just last week my very first feta! Trying to build my skills to get to harder cheeses.

Was really glad to find this forum, there's certainly lots of great information here! I only wish those attachments were still available directly on this site. However, I did find that most of the attachments could be found on wayback machine, for example see https://web.archive.org/web/20190512055406/http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,438.0.html

[Vanessa s]

Ooh, I've been getting very frustrated not opening any attachments.. How does way back site work.. I couldn't work that either

[mikekchar]

Have not gotten any verification about this, but I think the attachments are just gone.  Probably the victim of some data loss during an upgrade, etc.  It's a shame, but it is what it is.

The Wayback machine is a crazy thing run by the Internet Archive.  Their absolutely insane goal has been to archive everything on the web *every single day*.  The idea is that you can search for any website on any day in history and check out what people actually posted.  The world is full of revisionist history with people claiming things that are outright lies.  The Wayback machine allows you to actually check if people are telling the truth.  You can even compare a website on two days in history and see when things changed.  It's a super powerful cultural tool.

As a by-product, though, you can also go back in time and find stuff that got lost -- such as the attachments on cheeseforum.org :-)  Let's pick a very popular and valuable thread and see how this works.

First, the Wayback machine is here: https://archive.org/web/

We need a link to search for.  Let's pick Alpkäserei's classic thread on traditional rind washing techniques for alpine cheeses (an absolute *must read* if you ever want to do washed rind cheeses IMHO).  This is the link to the thread on cheeseforum.org: https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10633.0.html

We put that link in the search bar at the top of the Wayback machine and press "BROWSE HISTORY" to get a calendar.  We need to pick a date.  At the top, you can see where all the changes have happened.  We need to go far enough back that the attachments still existed, but not so far that we miss some of the thread.  I'll click on 2019.  Then I'll select the one snapshot on September 12th to get: https://web.archive.org/web/20190912192729/https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10633.0.html

There are a couple of problems.  One of the pics on the front page doesn't get shown because it was stored on a different system, and so that pic is not part of this snapshot.  Also *each* page is archived separately, so you can't use the links on the archive to get to the next page.  You need to go back to the original, get the link, paste it back into the Wayback machine, and select a snap shot.  One for each page.

For example, here's page 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20190912215443/https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10633.15.html

Here's page 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20190916032426/http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10633.30.html

But... On page 3, we run into another problem.  Alpkäserei put his pics on Bitbucket and so they aren't part of this snapshot (again).  But!  You can go back to the original page to see them :-) https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10633.30.html

I hope that helps.  It's a pain in the bum, but it's better than nothing.  Also, if you have some spare cash in your pockets, it's worth sending some to Archive.org.  They are doing some amazing work and I have no idea how they manage to do so much with so little.

[Vanessa s]

Thanks, will attempt