This is followed, as before, by the three most recent posts on Members' forum, but below this is a completely new feature, my two Latest tweets. Some of you may think that Twitter is an abomination. I did at first but, as I explained in Twittering last May, I finally came round to the idea of sending messages of up to 140 characters. In fact I have found this an increasingly useful way to communicate brief observations, or recommendations of wines, places, people and online articles that are not necessarily worthy of a whole article but are certainly worthy of your attention. In fact, my latest tweets are now on the home page specifically because I have felt increasingly that I have been short-changing visitors to this site by not sharing with them what I was communicating via Twitter.
However sceptical you are about Twitter as a whole, please take a look at my most recent tweets at the bottom of the home page from time to time. To see them all, just click on the 'Jancis' link in Latest tweets from Jancis, or go to www.twitter.com/jancisrobinson. Feel free to leave a comment below this article if you cannot bear to follow me via Twitter or if you think the whole thing is a waste of time.
If a tweet begins with an @X, by the way, that means it's an answer to a tweet from X. RT prefaces a 'retweet' of something someone else has tweeted. You will also notice a lot of strange-looking URLs beginning http. These are just a way of scrunching web links so that they don't take up too many characters.
Tasting notes search
As the oldtimers among you know, our tasting notes database has evolved, and we hope improved, enormously over the last year or so. We suffered a frustratingly long hiatus while our last developers struggled with the new system, during which we were unable to upload tasting notes into the database. Tamlyn Currin and team are racing to make up the time but there are still about 4,000 tasting notes that have not yet been added to the 30,000+ tasting notes that are already in the system for the Tasting notes search to range over. We hope very much to be up to date within a month or so but in the meantime, do check Tasting articles by region if you can't find a wine using Tasting notes search. This is a complete and more up-to-date guide to all the tasting articles ever published, right up to the present.
Softwire have recently added two improvements to the way in which the results of a search of the tasting notes database is presented. Firstly, wines are colour coded in the list of wines you are presented with when instigating a search. White wines are shown in green, red wines in crimson and pink wines – well, we'll leave that for you to guess.
In this initial list of search results, you have been able for some time to choose how they are sorted, by clicking on any of the headings at the top of the list. What now happens, however, is that if you choose to sort by Score, the default positon is that the highest scoring wines appear at the top. (You can of course reverse this order by clicking on 'Score' again.) Similarly, the default position for sorting wines by Date tasted is that the wines tasted most recently appear at the top. At the moment, for some wines tasted recently, this 'Date tasted' is actually the date of publication of the relevant Tasting article rather than the strict date of tasting, which we will try to rectify. We hope, however, that you agree that overall, both these adjustments are improvements on the previous situation, which listed the lowest scoring wines and those tasted longest ago at the top as the respective defaults.
Don't forget, by the way, that to get to individual tasting notes from this initial list of all possibilities, just click any word in the name of the wine you want to view in detail.
'Preferences' becomes 'My account'
And finally a very small change. We have renamed the section at the bottom of any purple page which allows you to change your password and your personal details or to renew your membership. We hope that the name 'My account' makes it all a bit clearer.
Please don't hesitate to comment below on this or any other general site housekeeping matter.
