The Adegga Blog

We have been in closed beta mode for almost a month now (since reboot). If you have subscribed to be notified when we launch don’t despair! In a few weeks we’ll start sending invites so that you can start using adegga too!

There are a few people using the site right now (some using the moo invite cards) and providing amazing feedback. We have been fixing bugs and making some developments based on that feedback.

However, there are many other people that have sent us emails asking to “peek inside” adegga. For those of you that are curious about what we are doing, here’s a couple of screenshots with descriptions of some of the features of the project.

Watchlist
When you’re using adegga you can add people, that you trust or would like to follow, to your Watchlist. (More on this on another post).

Cellar
You can catalog the wines you own. Tag, rate and write notes to organize the wines so that you can find them easily later.

Tasted Wines
Track which wines you’ve been trying. This way we never forget what was that amazing bottle you had last year.

Profile
There’s a profile page for each user. These pages are full of interesting information (and we’re adding more) that gives you an overview of each person. Besides the normal stuff, like a picture and some links, there’s a short stat on the number of wines the owns, tasted or wishes, there’s a user tag cloud and much more.

Shared wines
If you’re logged in, then any profile you visit will personalized information. You’ll be able to know which wines you share with that person and which wines you both want. Is this cool or what ?

There’s much more to show like the Wine page, the Producer profile or the Wine Shops area. I’ll posting about these pages in the next few days.

We wanted to create a set of invite cards to use as invitations for the social wine discovery project that we have been developing – adegga.

Step one: Opened a good bottle of red wine.

Step two: We thought about making 200 invite cards with a unique invitation code on each one.

We already knew and loved these little cards by Moo. They are eye-catching and small enough to be on a pocket or wallet. A Moo card can have pictures on the front and up to six lines of text on the back.

We thought we could use them with each invite code on the back, but we didn’t want to put each code manually on the back of each card. There was certainly a way of doing it without having to much work.

Step three: First bottle is over. On to the Porto! : )

Step four: Choosing 10 images was next. Why 10?

• With 10 images you can do 10 sets of cards
• You can only make a maximum of 100 moo cards at a time
• 20 sets gives us the 200 cards we want

It is advisable to resize photos to a smaller size cropping a little bit bigger than what you want so that moo can cut exactly where you want. You should also get them all on landscape format so that you don’t have to rotate them on moo.

Step six: Half of Port bottle was reached and it is time to tell how we got the code on the moo card without having to write the text manually on each one.There are six lines of text on the back of each card. Some can be filled with image properties. We decided that the picture name was the property we wanted to use (it’s the easiest).Now we need to copy and rename 100 pictures to put unique codes as the image’s name. There’s a non-geek way and a geek way (scripting) to do this. We did it the non-geek way and used google spreadsheet (example file here):

• Column A – original filename (10 for each image)
• Column B – each invite code
• Column C – use Concatenate Function and do something like this:
  =CONCATENATE(“cp “, A2, ” /tmp/adegga_mic/”, B2, “.jpg”)

Remember to create the /tmp/adegga_mic/ folder first.

Step seven: Now you need to upload all your new photos.

We used our Flickr account. We tried using the Mac tool but only the Windows Uploadr did actually remove the file extension (.jpg) from the name of the file.

Step eight: Further personalize your card. We choosed to add our site address (adegga.com) and add the cute little invite icon that moo provides.

Step nine: No more Port, the bottle is empty. Order the cards and wait (they say 10 days but it actually took less – 6 days).

Step ten: Start giving the away your new unique moo invite cards! We did it at Reboot 9 and people love them.