Eric
Posts: 5590
Joined: 10/10/2003
From: Seattle, WA
Status: offline
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v 3.9.1
The CellarTracker Integrated Wiki... (So what the heck is that?!? Let me explain...)
Let me say right now that this is probably the most exciting new release for CellarTracker than I can think of in the past 2 years. Now it won't appear that way at first, but I predict that in 6 months you will see what I mean and perhaps MUCH sooner as this takes shape.
For a long time now some of the most common requests from users have revolved around letting people add producer profiles, winery notes, links to producer sites, alcohol percentages, exact varietal makeups for a wine and so on. The challenge in adding fields for all of these was that (a) it's a lot of code and (b) the overhead for me to maintain all of this additional information is oppressive. Fast forward to October 6th of this year. For the first time in a few years I found myself playing in a PuzzleHunt at Microsoft. I used to do a lot of these and other 24-36 hour non-stop puzzle events. For a while now Google has been a indispensable tool during these events, but this year I found myself using Wikipedia more than ever before. Plus I also maintained a small Wiki during the hunt for our team so we could keep track of puzzle status, solutions etc. I have used Wiki technology before (a Wiki is basically just a community editable website with some fairly clever conventions for formatting and linking), but for some reason something clicked in my head. It just seemed obvious. Literally hundreds if not thousands of you have been CLAMORING for ways to add richer and richer wine data to CellarTracker, and the answer was to take actual Wiki software and Wiki techniques and embed them in CellarTracker in a tightly integrated way. (One of the nice things about a Wiki is that any user can add/edit information, and a history of these revisions is stored in case someone goofs up.)
And so there you have it. Now you have two kinds of Wiki things to play with: - On any wine detail page you can now easily attach articles to the specific wine, producer, type, varietal, designation, vineyard, country, region, subregion or appellation. And once you do so, those articles will appear on other wine pages as appropriate. These are rich fields with a powerful (only textual for now) formatting language that lets you create tables, lists, links and a lot of nice formatting.
- The integrated Wiki articles are terrific in that they appear when necessary. However, I don't want these to overwhelm the wine pages if a given article is too long. So, I have also integrated a full-blown, standalone Wiki site at http://www.cellartracker.com/ow.asp so that longer articles can be placed here and linked to from the inetgrated Wiki articles. As an example, here is a integrated article that now appears on drilldown page for every wine from the Region of Alsace: http://www.cellartracker.com/showwikirevision.asp?JoinType=Region&iIndex=1 and in the interest of brevity this links to a much longer article here: http://www.cellartracker.com/ow.asp?AlsaceEntryGuide
- You can see all of the integrated Wiki articles here: http://www.cellartracker.com/list.asp?Table=CTWiki
All of this will frankly be a bit of a balancing act. The functionality is compelling enough and baked enough that I wanted to put it out there as implemented. I am hoping that people will respect the guidelines, use common sense and be open to editorial feedback from me and the community. This is a powerful tool but needs to be used in a particular way for best effect...
That was the meat of the release. For those very observant folks, I have had some Wiki articles running on the site for the past 5 days, and the feedback has been excited but also hesitant regarding the ability of these articles to overwhelm the wine detail pages. It was time for some long overdue cleanup and consolidation of the page. Frankly, more needs to happen, but this paves the way: - Effective immediately when you drilldown to a wine (if logged into the site) first you will see a section entitled MY HOLDINGS which pulls together your data on Inventory, Purchases and Consumption into one grouping at the top of the page. Community holdings have been decoupled and moved to the bottom of the page.
- Next up is the block showing drinkability, valuation and your private note. Yes, odd cousins there but these have been together on the page since 2003. Will be changed to be more sensible in the future.
- Next is the Wiki block showing the aforementioned integrated articles.
- Next are personal and community tasting notes (with more clarity between these two sections). A future change here is to allow people to only show the most recent X notes etc. For very heavily tasted wines it is just too much of a good thing right now.
- Next are the professional reviews, both the pre-integrated channels and any reviews that each user has privately added for themselves.
- Next are the community holdings. In the future I will likely offer more summary data here and suppress the current gory stuff by default. Longer term this is where you only really want to see detailed holdings by default for your buddies. Yes, in the future there will be a much richer buddy concept on the site for those that want to interact. Trust me, I have been using Facebook, Cork'd and others and I have more than seen the light.
- Finally your transactions. Likely to suppress those by default unless a user wants to turn them on. Mostly just good for helping people to 'debug' what they have done with a wine.
- Also potentially in the future for those that want it will be a breakdown of all of this into a few tabs (holdings, reviews, community). Need to think that through and may wait on that until deeper facelifts happen on the site.
I also took the opportunity to cleanup the printer-friendly views, suppress more stuff that doesn't make sense when printing a wine detail page. And now the "guest" view of a detail page is a lot cleaner and less noisy.
And so there you go. I have officially armed you to add a whole new level of data to CellarTracker. If each user does this for just a few of their wines the impact for the community and the wine world at large will be remarkable. CellarTracker is already the largest database of high quality wine information with nearly half a million wines out there. (Don't be deceived by other bigger numbers that you may see on some parasitic web-crawled sites. Most are rife with duplicates and ugly data.) If and when people fill in more details about the wines the additional utility of this database for all of us will be considerable.
By the way, special thanks to Laurens Pit who created the wonderful, modular OpenWiki codebase!
http://www.openwiki.com
Enjoy!!!
< Message edited by Eric -- 12/8/2007 12:58:38 PM >
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Cheers!
-Eric LeVine
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