We have been a little quite. Mostly because we’ve been working on improving Adegga and preparing some new things.

During the last couple of weeks we have split our time between small tweaks, architecture and design of some bigger things (topic for another post) and of course drinking wine (with Portugal playing like this we have lots of reasons to celebrate).

So what did we change? We did a bunch of little changes that make Adegga more interesting and easier to use:

• New online wine shops: 15 to be exact, from around the world. With this we now have more prices on more wines so we decided to show the prices box on the sidebar of every wine page.
  
• New Wine search: search results are now ordered by rating by default., there’s an option to display or hide wine labels on results and another option to select the number of search results per page (20, 40 or 60).
• Search a wine using the AVIN: if you found an AVIN around the web (for example on the tags here or here) you can enter it on the wine search box and you’ll go directly to that wine.*
  
• User homepage redesign: this is the page you see when you login. It now shows you how many wines you have in your cellar, on your wishlist and many you’ve tasted. The redesign also cleaned some unused options.
  
• Faster blogs posts: we have improved the speed and readability of the list of blog posts for every wine wine. They now load much faster and are easier to read.
• Bigger profile pictures (avatars): to see an example check the user page. This makes it much easier to see who’s adding a tasting note or making a comment.**
• New favicon: as an indication to where Adegga design is going we have released our cool new favicon!.
  

* you can also search by AVIN using Adegga’s integrated search bar on Firefox or any other browser.
** We’ll be changing this in more places so this is a good time to update your profile picture.

We’ve added simple little way to search wines and wine blogs on Adegga directly from your browser!

To add this search just follow this 3 simple steps:

1. Visit Adegga.com.
2. Check the top right corner of your browser. Click on Add “Adegga.com - Search Wines” or Add “Adegga.com - Search blogs” to add Adegga search engine.
3. Enjoy!

Here’s an example screenshot from Firefox:

If you need help configuring this on your browser leave a comment below and we’ll help you out.

We have been busy developing new stuff at Adegga and we’ve finally launched the new features.

Here’s what we’ve added:

• A wine blog search engine which covers more than 400 wine blogs.
• New prices and shops. We have a new wine shop search engine that includes more shops, more prices and better interface. Try this example: Wine prices for Barca Velha 1995.
• Top Wines: Top Red Wines, Top White Wines, Top 2005 Wines and many more.
• New Adegga search engine that now allows for searching on wines, producers, wine shops and wine blogs.

We’re fixing some minor bugs so if you find any or have any suggestion please let us know.

Wine Blog Search Engine
From all the new features the wine blog search engine is the one we’ll be talking a lot more in the near future. Information about a wine is not only about it’s tasting notes or technical information. There’s lots more information that is useful and available these days so we’re integrating new sources of information in order to provide access to even more useful information for each wine.

We’re indexing more than 400 wine blogs. It’s now easy to search all these blogs or check what are the latest news.

The AVIN
Together with the wine blog integration we’re finally deploying an interesting way to use our unique code for each wine - the AVIN. This code basically lets us track what is being said about a wine online and at the same time gives wine bloggers more visits and targeted visibility. See for example this wine Cortes de Cima Reserva 2003.

If you’re a wine blogger and want to learn how to get your posts listed please read this.

We’ve supported 4 different rating scales (5 stars, 10 points, 20 points or 100 points) since we launched. One of our top requested features was the ability to rate wines using half-points. We finally implemented this.

We’re now working on allowing you to read ratings in scale you like (and not just rate). For now you can safely rate your almost perfect wine with 19.5 (or 4.5 or 9.5 or 95).

Set your default scale
To make it easier to rate a wine, you can also now choose a default rating scale in your settings. For example, if you choose the 20 points scale then all the places where you can rate will display this scale by default.

We’ve redesigned the tasting note page and it’s now easy to manage your notes.

We only show 2 fields by default (rating and note) and all extra information (tags, food pairing and tasting date) is hidden by default to make the interface more simple to use.

Wine actions
We’ve also simplified actions on a wine page so that list actions (add to cellar, add to tasted and add to wishlist) are clearly split from the rating actions (rate and write a note).

We’ve been making little interface improvements when whenever we discover a problem. If there’s a features or an interface problem that is bugging you while using Adegga, let us know so that we can fix it.

We’ve been working hard on getting a bunch of new features ready for launch (and that’s why we’ve been so silent). We’ll be rolling out this new features (and some updates) in the next couple of weeks.

To start we’ve launched today a new way to communicate on Adegga: Private Messages.

Sending a new message is very easy. You can contact anyone directly from their profile page or you can compose a new message from your account.

You also notice that the number of unread messages is always visible at the top of the page.

If you have any questions or comments lets us know.

We think that Wine Blogs are one of the best things that ever happened to the wine world. Wine bloggers have been doing an amazing job connecting wine and people. There’s a big conversation going on and fortunately even some wineries are starting to follow (for two good examples check Pinotblogger and El Bloggo Torcido).

Because we think that this conversation is healthy and important we want to help more people find out what is happening on the wine blogosphere. We have some ideas on how to do that. This are the first two.

Wine Blogger Accounts
A few months ago we started testing a special account type for wine bloggers. Having this account makes it easier for anyone to find, read and follow a wine blogger. Every wine blogger who has an account on Adegga receives a nice little yellow star that appears everywhere next to the username (on profile, tasting notes, etc).

(Here’s Gabriella Opaz - from wine blog Catavino - profile)

Wine Bloggers List
We have always wanted to add more interesting information to our people page. Adegga is about people, after all. We already had which users were most active and which one had recently signed up. However, one of the things we wanted to add was a place to find which Wine Bloggers were using Adegga. And we finally added that. Now in this page we have access to the list of Wine Bloggers using Adegga ordered by the number of people following them. Here’s a screenshot:

We have a lot more features to help wine bloggers. If you’d like to have one of this accounts please leave a comment bellow or contact us directly.

Thinking about the upcoming Wine Blogging Wednesday we decided to implement a new feature: Tag Descriptions.

Wine Blogging Wednesday (or WBW) is a monthly virtual wine tasting. Each month there’s a different theme and bloggers try to taste wines according to that theme. Then, a hosting blogger aggregates all the entries by posting about who has participated.

We thought about it for a while and decided to help people discover more about Wine Blogging Wednesday and at the same time help our Adegga members easily add the tasted wines to their own lists (cellar, tasted or wishlist).

We already had a page for each tag but it was not descriptive enough. So we added* the possibility of anyone adding more information!

Tag Description for “wbw38″
An example:
If all wines tasted in the WBW38 theme** were tagged with WBW38, someone who happens to visit the WBW38 tag page might wonder what WBW is all about. But because someone (in this case me) already added a Tag Description there’s no more confusion. It even has links to the correct sources of information.

So anyone can add a description to a tag. If there’s already a description in place but you would like to change it, just flag the description and tell us what you want to change.

Want to help us add Tag Descriptions? Try douro, lemon or cabernetsauvignon.

* credit goes to Technorati for creating the WTF (no. It’s Where’s the fire?) feature which we used as inspiration.
** original list kindly provided by the cool guys at Catavino. Thanks Ryan and Gabriella!

The closed beta has been great on new features. We have seen a growing number of wines in people’s cellars and tasted wines lists. However, the more wines people add the more difficult it is to look at their wine lists. So we started thinking that there should be a better way to look at all those wines.

Overview
The first time you access a list of wines it looks like a soulless list of items and you don’t really know where to start looking. There’s too much information and it’s not organized. So we’ve created a new way to visualize wines on Cellars and Tasted Wines lists and allow filtering based on it.

We called it Overview. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.

You can filter wine lists by clicking on each item and, if you click in 2 different options (a country and a vintage for example), you’ll get all wines from that country and that vintage.

Search
Many times however, we know the exact name of a wine. So now you can also search user’s cellars and tasted wines lists using the new search feature.