Cappin’ Crunch

posted by mark in Snooth

It’s always a mixed blessing to watch the website grow. As more people see us and come back I’m obviously happy. We’re building the website for this exact purpose.

But I do get that sinking feeling when I see a sharp increase in traffic. Every system will break under some amount of load, with varying degrees of engineer horror. You might simply notice a slowdown in performance. As a user this is easy to cope with given some patience and maybe a glass of wine to calm the nerves. If things go horribly wrong and database queries begin to back up they might never complete (especially with liberal use of the browser stop or back button) — at the risk of getting too technical, this can lead to data loss and the pulling of hair.

Fortunately we’ve done load testing on Snooth and we know it’s going to be okay, but there’s still that slight dizziness that comes with the occasional article at Techcrunch… Will we hold under the surge? Well, we did this time, but I’m still thinking about performance and scalability. You deserve a smooth Snooth!

What Does That Thing Do?

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

A couple quick updates from tech today. First off, you may have noticed the 3 ‘a’s hanging out at the upper right of the page. Those tools fiddle with the font size on the page — making it bigger should be a snap if you find it a tad too small.

Until recently the tools were not sticky. That is, if you navigated off the page where you used them, the text snapped back to the default smaller size. Not so anymore! We’ll be only too happy to remember your preferred size.

Secondly, if you know for a fact you are not interested in one of the wines we have recommended for you, now you can tell Snooth that you are not interested in that recommendation and we’ll clear it out for you with a fresh set of recs. You can do this using the menu icon next to the wine name on your recommendations page. That menu contains a collection of useful links for interacting with a wine.

Make sure you wishlist any of the recommendations you’d like to keep around before you do this though — they might all change depending on how active your fellow Snooth users have been. You can also “bookmark” the wine by adding it to your “My Wines” page.

Not sure how to add to “My Wines”? Try this button on the wine details page!

Success!

posted by mark in Snooth

Snooth is back online. Hopefully that’s something we can all raise a glass to!

Scheduled Maintenance

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

As you may have read in the newsletter, we are making some improvements to help the site perform better. More specifically, that’s going to happen tonight, so if you’re up late Snooth should be unavailable between 12AM and 5AM EST.

Come back tomorrow to see if you notice a difference!

Wine Quality At a Glance

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

When I’m shopping online, I find it useful to read customer reviews of the products I am looking to purchase. Of course, some customers will leave only a rating and not a text review. The ratings are useful as well, but unfortunately it can be overwhelming to try and get a sense for a product by looking at a list of detached ratings. What Snooth can do with all of these ratings is powerful. We can create a SnoothRank — one number which incorporates all of the ratings for that product.

SnoothRank is a good step towards making it easier to quickly digest a group of ratings, but we knew we could do better. On Friday we quietly launched the “Ratings Overview” section of the wine details page.

Each wine has two graphs. The first is a breakdown of all the ratings posted for a wine. Here you can easily see where the community stands.

The second graph shows average rating over time. This graph can be especially useful if you are trying to decide when to drink that bottle in your cellar. If you notice that the ratings have been steadily improving over the years you may wait a bit, however if the ratings are beginning to plateau why not cook a nice meal and pop that cork!