We’ve made a couple of nice improvements to how we push updates to your twitter feed. (more info on how to connect your WineLog and twitter accounts here)
1. We now delay updates to your twitter feed by 5 minutes. This enables us to combine activity on one wine (e.g. if you rate and comment on a wine) into one update that goes to your twitter feed. This will also prevent unnecessary twitter updates if you change your rating on a wine, etc.
2. We have updated how tweets are added to the @winelog feed. We now space the updates out throughout the day based on how much activity is happening on the site. So instead of seeing 20 updates from @drxeno at once, those updates will come every two to ten minutes.
(more after the break)
I’ve just updated the website to use the word “Rose” (missing the accent) where we had been using “Blush” in the past.
What are you talking about?
Well, “rosé” and “blush” are most commonly used to refer to the same thing: wines that are neither Red nor White. These wines are different shades of pink. In fact, “rose” means “pinkish” in French.
According to Wikipedia, “Blush” was originally coned by Charlie Kreck of Millcreek Vineyards in Sonoma to describe a pink colored wine he made from Cabernet grapes. Kreck trademarked the name, but that didn’t stop other American wineries from using it to describe their pink, semi-sweet wines.
Purists may only use Rose for French or European wines and Blush for American wines, but in general both terms are interchangeably.
Facebook has this great thing called “Facebook Connect” that would do this pretty seamlessly, but it will take some coding mojo from me to get that integrated on a site as complex as WineLog. It’s on “the list”.
Until we get that hammered out, there IS a way to push your activity to Facebook with the help of our little friend Twitter. Here’s how:
I’ve received a free sample for some wine that is … simply … awesome. It’s really good stuff. I’m sure that 90% of your would like this wine. It’s that good.
I considered just sending an email to our users asking you to buy some, but I’ve promised wine producers that WineLog can do better than that. I’ve promised that we can find the top 1% of WineLog members who would absolutely love this wine.
Are you one of the top 1% of WineLog members perfect for this wine? Help us find out.
Observant users have noticed that updates to your WineLog were no longer being tweeted. An update in the Twitter API invalidated our code, but I’ve fixed it and all is good now.
Log/Tweet away!
It’s been a crazy week for us here. If you haven’t noticed, WineLog.net has been offline for almost an entire week. And before that our uptime was spotty. I’ll try to cover the key points of interest below, but feel free to comment here or contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
What Happened?
The company we were hosting our site with secretly sold their business. With no prior notice, our servers were migrated to a new location. This caused a bit of downtime as we updated the winelog.net domain to point to the new servers.
This wouldn’t have been so bad, but it turns out the new setup was not really ready. A few days later, the server restarted randomly, was down completely at times, and finally “disappeared”. The support team cited “hardware issues”. We lost access to the server and had to fight hundreds (thousands?) of other clients for the attention of the support staff to get our servers back.
When the servers came back, we realized they had been restored using backups from January 27th. We have lost all data updated on the site between January 27th and February 7th. This is probably about 250 new users, 500 newly added/logged wines, a few blog posts, and numerous other bits of data that we know if very important to our users.
We are very sorry that your data may have been lost, and we are doing everything we can to get it back.
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that tonight is the great Wine 2.0 event in New York City. If you didn’t know until right now, don’t fret. Get your butt into the city and join the fun. I’ve even heard rumors that you can drop Cornelius’ name and get them to give you the pre-reg price when you show up at the door. I heard.
WHEN:
Thursday September 18th
Doors Open:
7pm 11pm, after party from 11pm 4am
Where:
Webster Hall, 125 E 11th Street, New York, NY 10003
(get directions)
Phone:
Wine 2.0, (415) 596-1191 for more information or Cornelius@winetwo.com
General Admission:
$45 pre-register / $75 day of event (wink wink)
I’ll be rocking it at the WineLog table and trying my best to stay awake during the after-party (last night’s was rough too). ‘hope to see you there.
We just released a couple of long-requested features.
(1) You can now edit your “comments” as well as your notes. Simply click on the comment text from the wine log or wine info pages (while logged in). For more on the difference between comments and log notes, read this.
(2) Clicking on the “hide notes” link on [...]
We have integrated with Twitter in a couple of ways:
(1) All logging, rating, and commenting done by our users is now “tweeted” over to the WineLog Twitter feed.
(2) If your share your Twitter details on your WineLog account page, all of your logging, rating, and commenting will be “tweeted” over to your own Twitter account.
But what is this Twitter thing?
(more after the break)
