The Adegga Blog

Wouldn’t it be great to know what wine bloggers wrote about a specific wine? We’ve build that feature a couple of months but now with over 500 indexed wine blogs and with a little fine tuning we’re officially launching it.

Better than explaining how it works let me show you an example:

When you visit the wine Quinta do Crasto Reserva Vinhas Velhas 2005 you’ll find this list of wine blogs that wrote about this wine. You can then easily click to visit the full blog post on each blog.

We have over 62,372 blog posts from wine blogs that we search to find the relevant ones for each wine. In the case where the wine you’re looking for is not on Adegga you can easily add it here and automatically all the related blogposts will be listed under the new wine.

How to get your blog posts listed?
If you’re a wine blogger and you’re interested in getting you posts on Adegga here’s what you need to do: Search the wine blog search engine for one of your posts to make sure that you’re blog is listed, if it’s not there let us know. If it is no need to do anything else, it’s done!

There is however something special for those of you how want well… to be special. If you use the little wine code we created (the ISBN for wines) on your posts (as a tag or in your article) or you link back to us, we will automatically move your post to the top of the blogs list and even include a star to give you something special.

To read more about how to do this read this article that explains how to use the AVIN in your posts.

Here’s how it looks if you use the unique code or link back to us:

We’ve done a lot of testing on this but if you find something wrong or just want to make a suggestion let us know.

This is the second post on the Meet-a-WineBlogger series which started with Andrew Barrow from Spittoon. Today we’re writing about a wine blogger that rarely writes about wine!

A few years ago Mike Duffy created a innovative product to help wineries better understand their websites. The Winery Web Site Report was a custom report that evaluated the website of a winery based on a set of 25 elements. Unfortunately for lack of demand the report is no longer published but, fortunately, the related blog still is.

The Winery Web Site Report blog is one of our favourite wine related blogs even if it is far from a regular wine blog. You won’t find any wine reviews, food pairings or comments about a winery. You will, however, find lots of information on helping wineries make their websites better. You’ll find such simple but very useful posts like Why Blogspot Is Not The Place For Your Winery Blog or The Most Useless Winery Web Site?.

Mike also maintains a very interesting list of winery blogs where you can find all sorts of examples of good and not so good winery blogs.

Why would this blog interest you? Mike follows a lot of what is happening about wine online. If you’re interested in wine and the Web, his blog is one of the best places to discover new stuff. We’ll definitely keep reading it!

Nuno asked us to make one of those little banner buttons so he could update his blog sidebar. So here it is:

The button can be copied to the sidebar of any blog by adding this little piece of code:
<a href="http://www.adegga.com/user/andre"><img src="http://www.adegga.com/static/images/myadegga.png" alt="My profile at Adegga.com" /></a>

Change andre in the text above for your own username to get a link to your profile.

Note: pun intended on the title.

We’re starting the year by launching something new (made just for you).

Every week you’ll receive a personal email with the latest wine updates from your friends so that you know what happened on the last 7 days. For each friend you’ll receive a list of their latest activity together with some nice photos of the tasted wines (so you can easily remember them).

Here’s a screenshot of one example email:

This way you can easily get ideas on what wine to buy or drink. As usual you can manage your email subscriptions on your account settings.

Adegga opened to the public 1 year and 3 months ago (actually 1 year and 102 Days) and we haven’t made an update on the stats since then! So here are some of stats from our wine community:

• We have almost 9.000 wines on the database (added mostly by you and having no duplicates)
• The countries with more wines are: Portugal (2.996), Spain (2.376), France (1.068) and Australia (548). (help grow the list of wines of other countries by adding the wines here)
• We have 3,985 wine ratings and reviews (our community goal is to get to 10.000 by 2010!)
• Our top users are: ryanopaz (557 reviews), edwardragg (485 reviews), Beber (Beber (261 reviews), Hugo Moreira (hmoreira (240 reviews), gabriellaopaz (142 reviews), emartins (140 reviews), cid (133 reviews), under (130 reviews), luisroboredo (124 reviews), scorpio (117 reviews).
• We have 50.200 searchable blogs posts and 81.638 tags from 559 wine blogs

This is all created by you and the other members. Thank you! Lets keep adding wines, rating and reviewing them so that we can get to 2010 with an even greater community!

We’re starting a new weekly (hopefully!) Meet-a-WineBlogger feature. The idea is to help more people discover some of the amazing wine blogs and wine bloggers out there. Andrew Barrow (Adegga, Flickr) is our first guest.

Andrew is the host of Spittoon where he writes his tasting notes and other thoughts on wine related subjects including a lot about food pairing.

Interestingly Andrew also writes for The Guardian, is a food blogger at SpittoonExtra and maintains a couple of other sites.

Andrew has an Adegga Wine Blogger Account and frequently uses the AVIN trick to get his posts automatically indexed and linked back from us. We love his notes so we keep voting them up (he now has almost 80 useful votes).

I should add that Andrew is one our community members that uploads more photos of wines (and his photos are g-r-e-a-t, example here). So thank you Andrew!

One last thing, Andrew asked a while ago that we added a way to see who uploaded each photo. We’ve just added that nice detail to each wine page!

A little bit later than usual but here we are to wish you an splendid 2009 with lots and lots of wine (buying, drinking and selling)!

I have a couple of quick updates:

• We’ve spent December mostly fixing little bugs. After we launched the new homepage and change home to a new server we have have been ironing out a few issues here and there. If you see anything not working let us know via this feedback box!
• Christmas was crazy as usual as everyone is searching for wine online (isn’t wine a lovely gift!). We had a spike on traffic with a lot of new users joining the community. Welcome to you all!
• Our video is a bit delayed. Some people desperately want to participate but took a little longer to send their videos and made us a little late. No worries. A couple more days and it will come out! Promise.

I’ll be back soon with some exciting posts!