The tech team at Snooth will be performing regular maintenance on our systems Wednesday, November 11 from around 12AM ET. The site will be unavailable during this period. We expect the maintenance will last for no longer than one hour.
Thank you for your patience.
This week we have a number of updates focussed on making Snooth more interactive and social. First off is a bit of functionality that users have been asking about for a while. When you’re browsing the prices for a wine, you can now sort the merchants by featured status, name, price and even bottle size. We’re excited to continue helping people find better prices for wine, and this should make it even easier to do just that.
In 2009 Snooth spent a lot of time working with food and wine. In partnership with Epicurious.com and MyRecipes.com we were able to bring you recipe pairings directly on the wine details pages. We’ve heard from many of you that this is very helpful. We did want to gather feedback on individual pairings in the interest of promoting the good matches and tweaking any bad matches out of the system. To that end, we added the ability to vote on specific pairings. We’re looking forward to the added feedback on our electronic sommelier.
Finally, you’ll see more and more links around the site to Twitter and Facebook. We love seeing information from Snooth make it out to other social networks. Adding these links makes it easier than ever to get the word out about the wines, wine articles, and discussions about wine you’re following on Snooth.
Spam, spam, spam! When we first started building Snooth, there were only a few stalwarts here using the site, adding content and reviews and browsing the forum. (To be completely fair, the forum didn’t even exist back then.) Unfortunately, one of the prices of growing a community these days is fighting the war against spam. A while ago, spammers started to create accounts on the site and would message 10-20 users before abandoning their accounts. You, the users of Snooth, would have no recourse other than to write to us, and we would delete the user, but we always knew we could do better.
The day is finally here. As of today, you can now mark messages as spam to remove them from your inbox. We’ve also added the ability to delete old messages. We hope these two features will help you to keep your inboxes free of unwanted or outdated messages.
It would be even better if the spammers got the hint and didn’t even try to come knocking. I’m not holding my breath for that, but a guy can dream.
This week we’ve got a few exciting updates on the site. The first, and highest in profile, is a new section on our wine profile pages. As I continue to grow with my knowledge of wine, I find it’s very helpful to talk to someone who is further along in their journey. It is helpful to localize what I’m experiencing to hear someone else describe what they’ve grown to know.
On many of our wine profiles, you’ll now see a section that does just that. It tells you what to expect when you’re tasting the wine. I’m excited to use this to get a hint about what I might find in a new grape or new region’s wines.
Here’s an example of this section on a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, certainly one of the distinctive and iconic wines of the world.
We’ve also made it possible for users to upload more than a single photo for any wine profile. If you’ve got a bottle shot of your own, you can now add that to the wine. This can be very helpful, especially when the current photo is blurry, or if you have a version of the bottle with a label from another country. The same wine can have different labels in different markets, so one image may not be enough information.
There are a few great reasons why the collection of websites that we have come to rely on is called the World Wide Web. One of them is how much it does resemble a web. The places and destinations on that web are interconnected. On a spider’s web, any one strand would blow away in the breeze, but the connections between them make the whole structure strong.
Websites linking to each other makes a powerful network. Just as powerful are the links within a site, directing related pages around and allowing for a seamless browsing experience. With the release of our article pages, we found a great opportunity to go back and strengthen the Snooth web. When you’re reading an article or a post in Snooth Talk, it is very convenient to be able to learn more about the wineries, wine regions, or wine grape varieties mentioned in the text. Now you can do that using our handy links. If you’re looking at the details for a Chardonnay, and you’re curious to read what articles have been written about Chardonnay, now you can do that too.
We hope this class of helpful links will allow the site to flow more, and help you to become lost in the pursuit of more wine knowledge, as we continue to bring more of it into one place.
It’s no secret that we’re excited about the articles section. As the newest pages to launch on Snooth, they represent our continued commitment to bring information about the greatest wine regions, wine varieties, wines and wine producers directly to you. Through our emails and now the article pages supporting the emails, we’re ready to start sharing.
What’s sharing without friends to share with? Snooth is a social site, and an article without a place to talk about it is like a tree falling in the forest. If we don’t invite conversation from you, we aren’t doing the right thing. So this week, we’ve got a few exciting additions to the article pages. First off, you can leave comments right on the articles. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure your voice is heard.
To make sure that voice continues to be heard, everyone should be able to find articles from the past and the comments that have been made on them. As of today, you’ll notice a convenient search box to the right of the articles so you can find commentary about whatever you’d like to learn about.
If you’re keen to browse, we’ve also added a related articles section. If you love an article, and you’d like to learn more about related topics there’s a simple way to do that. All of these (and a few other goodies) we’re happy to present to you today.
Check these new features out on Greg’s articles about California Sauvignon Blanc or California Syrah.
I’m looking forward to future changes. Have you told me what you’d like to see yet?
As some of you may know, I recently was out on the West Coast for about a week. While I was out there, myself and a few other Snooth members planned to experience the countryside of California by pairing wine with hiking. Fortunately, California Wine Hikes wine and hiking guru Russ Beebe (the Winehiker) was right there to help us.
The destination was Picchetti Winery, which is nestled towards the bottom of Montebello Rd in Cupertino. Montebello road is a steep and windy, very pretty road that snakes up through the Cupertino mountains, topping out at Ridge Vineyards which I was also able to visit later during my trip.
The hike was to be an out-and-back hike along the trails behind the winery, part of the nature preserve there. The trail was well chosen by our guide as it was kept well, not too steep, and had plenty of great sites along the way. It was about 4 miles in total.
We had prepared a pot luck lunch per our guide’s instructions, but first it was time to work up an appetite. Here we are, ready to start our hike.
We had beautiful weather for the hike, and I noticed that as we walked along the path, the temperature would change from warm to cool, as the sun heated up the hills around us and breezes carried that temperature differential our way. I never felt uncomfortable as a result. It was cool as much as warm. Similarly, the breezes carried some of the smells of the surrounding countryside to our nostrils. I found the aromas along the trail changed as much as the temperature did, so there was always a new sensory combination to appreciate.
Russ gave a great overview of some of the flora surrounding us. From Mugwort plants, the California Buckeye, to Bay Trees, and the Indian Paintbrush and Soap Plant, there were plenty of stories to share.
We all enjoyed seeing this rooster come strutting through, so there was a bit of fauna as well.
I also returned with a number of great photos of the trail and the surrounding countryside. Below you can see a photo I snapped of the trail, and one of the nearby reservoir.
Near the end of the hike, we decided to tackle a hill up to the old Picchetti vineyards. The Zinfandel vines up there were over a hundred years old, very gnarled, and still producing great fruit after all of these years.
And finally we returned to the cars, doffed our hiking gear and hauled out the food. I know by that time I was ready for it. Included was a lovely barley salad and chickpea salad, great breads and cheeses, olives, cherries, and of course the wine came out, we opened a bottle of the Picchetti Zinfandel Belliciti Vineyard. We even had a few folks along without much of a taste for Zinfandel who by the end were singing the wine’s praises.
One of the wonderful things about being at a picnic table outside of the winery is that you can wander into the tasting room afterwards. Picchetti Winery pours a nice tasting of 5 wines for 5 dollars. Everyone opted into that, and we enjoyed a taste of wines made with Viognier, Chardonnay, Tempranillo, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot. Everyone was really happy with the Tempranillo particularly, which our pourer (Smiley) mentioned was doing a wonderful job of selling. If you’re interested in trying a bit of that juice, you might need to make it there before too much longer.
If you’re looking for a great way to experience the California countryside, wine, and friends, I highly recommend you call up Russ and organize a hike. He’ll tailor your experience to your fitness level, but he might suggest that wine be involved. I hope that’s okay.
Tell him I sent you.
Part of what helps enrich the Snooth experience is all of the images that wineries, retailers, and users upload for the wines and the group pages and their profiles. Previously Philip reported on the ideal standardized wine bottle shot. We thought it might be helpful to post some basic guidelines for what makes a good upload image.
We’ll automatically resize the image on our end to fit on the site, but the full size image will still be available to be viewed by users.
We’re constantly looking for ways to make Snooth better, and one of the best ways to have a great site is to have a well performing site. I come from a background in large scalable websites, and there are a number of tips and tricks, from backend query optimization and caching to front end request massaging and browser control.
One issue with global website performance is that of latency. Ultimately, when we’re talking about moving data around the world, the speed of light becomes a hard limit for how fast we could possibly perform. How can we solve the problem of serving content quickly to Snooth users in Europe or Asia, when our servers are in North America? The answer is to put the server close to the user!
Enter the CDN or Content Delivery Network, a distributed network of connected servers across the world. When a Snooth user in Asia requests a page on our site, most of the content they would download is delivered to them from a server within their city, on their network, instead of from our origin server. Initial reports from Snooth users are that their page load times have halved or even quartered.
There are many companies acting as CDNs, after looking at the options we decided to go with Akamai. Their network is unquestionably huge, 25,000 servers strong, and worldwide. We’re happy to be able to leverage such a wide reaching network to bring you a better performing Snooth!
As always, happy to hear your thoughts, and have a great weekend.
Just a quick note that we’ll be performing some server upgrades tonight. Our expected maintenance window is 1AM-4AM ET, during which time the site will be unavailable.