Eric
Posts: 5743
Joined: 10/10/2003
From: Seattle, WA
Status: offline
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These are very belated notes.
v3.6.2
Two weeks ago I checked in a relatively visible update to the tool for adding or editing a wine. This the first major update to this page in 22 months, and the goal was to greatly reduce the number of erroroneous and duplicated wines added to the system. CellarTracker provides 4 levels of location information: Country, Region, SubRegion and Appellation. The vineyard colums adds a 5th level. However, apart from those who are extremely familiar with wine regions, many users find this hierarchy somewhat error prone and confusing. In fact, we estimate that more than 75% of the erroneous or duplicated wine definitions on the site stemmed from a misunderstanding of how best to use these fields to encode a wine. With that in mind, the page has been changed or enhanced in a number of ways:
- When adding or editing a wine, by default you can no longer directly edit the Country/Region/SubRegion/Appellation. Rather, you have one button which allows you to do a full-text search to pick your 'locale' (e.g. a unique combination of these four fields). The results also show the number of wines which use a given locale, so weird outlier combinations tend to be pretty obvious (and we are working to weed these as well).
- The site still allows you to click an "(advanced)" hyperlink to toggle to the old UI, but as of last night we have removed the toggle from any wine in Rhone, Bordeaux and Burgundy. Having just finished large scrubs of the regional hierarchy there, we are no longer interested in letting people mess them up...
 - There are some other UI tweaks. The vintage is now an edit control at the top level instead of requring a tunnel to another screen. There is also a non-vintage checkbox. Clicking to add a new vintage from a wine drilldown page selects the vintage for you, much faster!
- Likewise, you no longer have to tunnel to change the display options (e.g. accepting the default display for that locale or forcibly telling the system to show varetial, appellation or both.
- Changes to wine display are now previewed live onscreen. The system has a rather complex method of combining the 10 underlying wine fields based on certain regional 'rules' to achieve a composed wine name. It used to be that you had to commit the wine to see this, but now you can see the new/edited wine name taking shape at the top of the screen as you edit.
- There are now little buttons at the top-level of the editor to clear off the vineyard or designation, again saving a tunnel to another screen.
- The various bits of help text on the drilldown screens for setting producer, designation, vineyard etc. have been adjusted based on the most common errors.
- Here is one that will REALLY help. When choosing to create a wine from scratch, there is now a big warning BEGGING people to go back and try searching again one more time. Invariably there is always a wine in the database like the one you want to create although not necessarily from that producer. If the user choose to push ahead, the process is now guided in order through 5 steps with a status indicator showing what you have done and what is left to do.
- The bulk-import mapper allows creating wines from scratch now that the UI is much less error prone and confusing.
So far the new changes REALLY seem to be working well. We have been VERY busy doing aggressive cleanup of the locale hierarchy with big scrubs completed on much of France, Italy and Australia as well as scrubs of Oregon and a mini-scrub of Spain. We have lots more to do, but the new system rewards all of the underlying wines are already very consistent. Anyway, I hope that people are noticing a marked improvement in the overall 'hygiene' of the wine database. With 199,703 wines (84,220 when excluding vintage variations), CellarTracker is one of the largest if not THE largest database of wines ever created.
v3.6.1
Again, more belated notes. Version 3.6.1 provided a heavily streamlined way for a user to retroactively add purchase information to existing inventory as described here.
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Cheers!
-Eric LeVine
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