The Adegga Blog

We’ve redesigned the My wines page and it’s now much easier to manage your tasted wines, your favourites, your cellar and your wishlist.

Before, you had 4 separate lists and your wine information was split between them. With the new my wines you can for example know which of my favourite wines you still have in the cellar and many other new things.

For those of you who use Adegga to manage your cellar we’ve also added a way to indicate where the wine is stored (like shelf 1 or Bin 12) and a little comment field for such practical things as taking a note if this wine was a gift from a friend.

In another update we’ve also added the 10 latest activities on each wine page. This will make it easier to check what members are doing with each wine at any time.

A while ago we developed something called the Winerank that is basically a ranking to describe how interesting a wine might be. The ranking is called social because it is based on the actions that each of the members of Adegga do for each wine. Lets see in detail how the process works.

The algorithm is a bit complex but it basically takes into account a bunch of properties for each wine and combines them together in a final value. Here’s how it works, for example, for the Cortes de cima Reserva 2003:

We know that:
- 18 people have tasted the wine
- 12 people have marked it as a favourite
- 17 people own at least one bottle
- 17 people wish this wine

We first weight these numbers based on other wines and then add them to the formula. We also add a couple more weighted values for the remaining wine properties (average rating, number of notes, etc.). In the end we get a final value that determines the Winerank of the wine.

The Winerank is automatically calculated every day for all the wines in the database so it can take up to 24 hours for your actions to influence the final Winerank of wine and the order of the lists that you see when you browse wines on adegga.

In the third post of our Meet-a-WineBlogger series I would like to let introduce you to Magna Casta, one of the most interesting Portuguese wine projects on the Web.

 

Magna Casta is mainly about the Portuguese wine world and if you’re interested in knowing more about Portuguese this is a great place to start looking. The site is in Portuguese but you can always navigate a translate version.

Magna Casta is authored by 3 people and all of them are on the top 10 active users of Adegga. Here’s where you can find them: emartins, under and scorpio

Magna Casta is very different from your usual wine blog in that it organizes information in an easy to find way. The site has 4 main sections: Wine where you can find wine reviews, Restaurants with reviews of restaurants in Portugal, Tourism with great descriptive articles of their winery visits and an Information section with such things as the Portuguese official wine regions.

You can follow them using the RSS feed but I would recommend dropping by the site once in a while and just loose yourself in the really good content.

We’ve been translating and testing multiple languages (French and Portuguese) in the last couple of months. Today we officially launch the Spanish version!

Thank you very much to all translators for the effort:

French translated by Gauthier Bouly (gotsky)

Spanish translated by our friends at Catavino (gabriellaopaz and ryanopaz)

Portuguese translated by us

Since today Adegga is also ready to be easily translated to other languages. If you feel like helping to translate Adegga to any language, just contact us at adegga AT adegga.com. It’s not necessary to make a full translation, any partial one will be also welcome (the translator will be mentioned in the credits, of course). Thanks in advance.

We keep making small improvements to make adegga even better!

Better, Faster, Stronger
We’ve improved a lot of small details that will make navigating adegga so much faster. As an example our new homepage is loading 4 times faster and a typical wine page will load twice as fast as it used to. All thanks to the tips taken from this optimization best practices article of the performance team at Yahoo.

Homepage update (now with wine regions)
We’ve also updated the homepage with small design details and a new improved wine region navigation that lets you easily browse wine regions for each country. If you’re using Adegga from Portugal this is how it looks:

Share this wine
More and more people are bookmarking and sharing a wine from adegga on Twitter (btw, here’s our twitter account). So we’ve added something that will save you some time when sharing each wine. Using these buttons you can easily jump to the site of your choice with the url of the wine (sometimes with the wine name too). Besides Twitter and del.icio.us it also works on facebook, Google Bookmarks and Furl. (if you would you like us to add another service let us know).

iPhone icon
And last (but not least) as requested by Diogo we’ve added a specific icon for the iPhone. When you bookmark adegga on the iPhone you’ll be able to automatically use the typical adegga icon and then comfortably use our mobile version: