Site developments – beware old bookmarks!

Several emails from purple pagers asking why their fellow members seem to have fallen silent since 21 Jun prompts me to remind you that we now have a completely new members’ forum which, to judge from general reaction, is seen as a big improvement on the previous one.

You can still access the earlier version from a link at the top of the new version but it’s clear that some purple pagers still have the old one bookmarked and have yet to discover the delights of the new one which include:

the ability to edit posts before publishing them
much easier ways to add formatting and URLs/web links
the abilty to add images, quotes, lists like this and ‘code’ (though I have to confess I still don’t understand that last one)
lists of threads divided by numbered pages so that the forum loads very much faster than its predecessor which is basically one enormously long list of all the threads posted between Sep 2006 and Jun 2007
the number of views as well the number of replies
details of the last person to add to a thread and timing
the number of posts each member has made

These refinements, many of them suggested by purple pagers themselves (for which many thanks), are in addition to the features of the last forum such as ordering posts alphabetically by topic and author and chronologically by when they were most recently updated by clicking on the little arrows by the titles at the top of the list of threads.

New tasting notes search

The tasting notes search has also been revolutionised, arguably more than the members’ forum, thanks to the creative and thoughtful work of Pete of Subhub.

Here are just some of the new features:

As well as searching by name of producer, wine, vintage, appellation and minimum score, you can now search by when to drink.
The wines revealed by your search can now be sorted by producer, vintage and score, by clicking once or twice (depending on which way you want them to appear) on those titles above the list of resulting wines.
Once you click on an individual wine to read the tasting note, you can also see the top five wines tasted at the same time as that wine, listed in declining order of score.
Clicking on the producer name at this point will also reveal all the tasting notes in the database made by that producer
There is also a 'Find this wine' link under every tasting notes so that you can immediately search for that particular wine's price and availabilty.

We also think we have eliminated all those pesky old tasting notes with scores such as ?? and ** as well as those with obviously aberrant dates of tasting/publication such as 5 Jul 2020, although do please pass on any examples that have escaped our net.

We are continuing to refine this tasting notes search as well as building a new way of feeding the tasting notes database. As soon as it’s ready we’ll be able to start adding the thousands of tasting notes which have accumulated since the beginning of the year (such as those on 2005 burgundies, 2006 bordeaux and 2006 German wines for starters) to the 15,000 tasting notes that can already be searched.

The new system will also have the great advantage that we can add tasting notes to the database as soon as make them even if they are not published as part of an article in the tasting notes section. This should make for a much richer resource of tasting notes on the site for your delectation.

I sincerely hope we’ll be sharing continually improving times ahead, folks.

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