A Better Way to Beta

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

It’s true — Snooth is post-beta. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be rolling out new features as fast as we can build them. Philip mentioned Snooth Talk yesterday. It’s getting closer by the minute, but before we release it to the public we are going to have a short beta phase.

And that’s the better beta. Rather than the whole application, we’ll be rolling out our biggest new features initially to a small group of our most involved or interested users. They will get a few days to review the work we’ve done and help us get the feature ready for prime time.

So how will it all work? As a beta user you’ll receive an email letting you know when a new feature is ready to test. When you log into the site you’ll be automatically brought to the beta version. The application and all of your data will be completely intact and will continue to appear on the non-beta site. You can communicate with us through Snooth Talk itself, or via the contact form. We’ll work through any changes the community requests and then open the doors to the greater Snooth community.

Hopefully this will make for even better features when they hit the streets. If you’re interested in being a beta user, definitely let us know. We’ve still got a few slots open for this beta period — but if you miss the boat this time you will still be able to sign up on the waiting list.

Vertical vs. Horizontal Tasting

posted by mark in Snooth, Wine

Vertical tastings are tastings that are organized to highlight the specific characteristics of a producer. All of the wines tasted come from different vintages. This is in contrast to a horizontal tasting in which the vintage is fixed. By fixing some of the variables that change a wine’s character you can focus on the variables you are targeting and how they effect the wine. This strikes me as a great way to learn about wine, and of course the method you choose should depend on what you are interested in learning.

If you are interested in how a producer makes wines and how they’re growing over time set up a vertical tasting of only their wines. I guarantee at the end you’ll have a great sense for that producer. This strikes me as being similar to reading all of the works of a specific author.

If you fix the vintage and taste through California you may not see as clearly at the end because the domain is so much broader. Still, you’ll learn something and it will probably be good enough.

Vertical is about specific details. Snooth is a vertical search engine, which means it exists within a limited domain. You would not come to Snooth to search for information about boats, for example. Instead you might go to the boat search engine, or barring the existence of one of those to a horizontal search engine. Understanding the domain is something we are quite serious about. We hope that any Snooth user is going to learn a lot about wine(, and not so much about boats).

Select a Wine Merchant

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

One of Snooth’s main goals is to help you make purchases comfortably and confidently on the web. Yesterday we launched the ability to add a merchant to your search. It’s something I find incredibly useful if I want to build a mixed case of wine from an online wine retailer. I can custom tailor my order at Snooth, check out on the merchant’s site, and use the time I saved to sip Cognac with my feet up.

To add one (or multiple) merchants, simply click the link in your control panel to “Add a Merchant”.

The top of the page will scroll down, revealing the “super header”:

Here you can easily select your merchant(s). Continue your normal Snooth searching within one or more wine stores that you prefer.

A final note from me is that Snooth is now out of beta. It’s been a year since we started to build the site, and we’ve now got a great base of features. There are some exciting things coming in the not so distant future — we certainly don’t intend to rest on our laurels!

Maintenance

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth

This morning we had some problems with the site involving a failed hard drive down at the data center. I have to say, this was quite a rude awakening after a pleasant Super Bowl Sunday!

Whether it’s on a snazzy server or your home PC a hard drive can fail. It’s easy to say “It won’t happen to me”. I’m glad we didn’t say that! One good part of all of this is that we got to test out our backups, which performed swimmingly.

Another benefit of the debacle was the chance to move over to our new master database — complete with a fancy RAID controller. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are two disks there now, and the database is mirrored across them. If either drive fails, the other drive completely picks up the slack, we get a warning, and we can replace the broken one at our leisure. RAID gives us the ability to sleep easier in the future, and I’m glad to add it to the team.

Tonight, I’ll drink to backups and RAID!