Vino2Vino Blog

We’re keeping busy here at Vino2Vino coming up with clever new ways to help you discover and learn about great wine. We also like it when things are convenient, and easy to use. And what’s more convenient than having the latest updates from your favorite wine-review website show up right on your personalized Google homepage?

The gadget is not in the official Google Gadget directory yet (it’s pending approval… yawn), but you can beat the crowd and start using it now. How? Simple! First you’ll need a Google Personalized Homepage (if you don’t have one already). Once that’s out of the way simply click here to add the V2V New Wines Gadget to your homepage. It’s that easy. No fuss, no muss. As always, we love feedback, so let us know how we can improve Vino2Vino for you!

I was taking a break from coding earlier and found a blog post on digg requesting a digg widget that would show your friends digg activity. It seemed like a pretty good idea, so I threw together a quick proof of concept. The styling isn’t great, but it works! Check out the sidebar here (on the homepage) for an example.

You can download the plugin here. Place it in the plugins directory for Wordpress then activate it under plugins (it’s called diggfriends). Once you’ve done that you can place a call to the digg_friends() function anywhere in your theme files and it will create a list of what your friends have dugg! The function takes one argument, your username, passed as a string.

It’s been over a week since my last update, but in that time we’ve developed a whole bunch of cool new features, a number of which should be particularly interesting to bloggers. I’ll start with the more general additions.

We’ve integrated a full fledged wiki with Vino2Vino.com so that we can easily add historical, biographical, or other amorphous wine-related information to the system. Wiki articles for wineries show up on the winery page, as you can see on the pages for Larkmead Vineyards, Concannom, and Beaulieu Vineyard among others. In addition to the winery articles the wiki can be used to include information that would otherwise be missing from the system. For example, check out the articles for Mike Grgich (owner/operator of Grgich Hills), André Tchelistcheff, and The Wine Group.

We’ve also made some improvements in the UI department with a new profile page (you can find it by clicking “My Profile” at the top of the page after logging in) as well as a new look for the wine lists page. There’s new functionality here too. On the profile page you can upload your own picture (or “avatar“), and on the wine lists page you can browse any number of user-created lists as well as auto-generated lists that show wines you’ve rated, commented on, tagged, or blogged! Which brings me to the new features for bloggers…

From what I’ve been reading around the web, wine bloggers are not that impressed with the current generation of “Wine 2.0″ websites. One common complaint is that these systems offer no easy way to cross-post a blogged wine review (or to interact with blogging software at all for that matter). We’re working hard to address these concerns, and have started by implementing Linkbacks (pingbacks really) so that bloggers who link to a V2V wine or winery page from a post, and have pingbacks enabled, will automatically see a reciprocal link back from that page to their blog post. For example, if I link to a couple of wines I’ve found particularly good recently, you’ll see links back to this page on the V2V page for each wine. We’re of the opinion that this mechanism will benefit us, bloggers, and users in general by creating an aggregated list of blog posts that discuss individual wines and wineries. So next time you discuss individual bottles of wine in a blog post, link back to V2V so your readers can find additional info about each bottle, and ours can find out what you thought!

[ http://www.vino2vino.com/wine/stream/mike?listname=Blogged%20Wines

Even cooler, if you have an account on V2V you can go to your profile page and associate your blog with your account. (If you don’t have an account, get one now! it’s free, and it only takes about 30 seconds… what are you waiting for?) After linking your V2V account and your blog, you will be able to view a list of wines you’ve blogged about on your wine lists page. And just like any other list, you can export your list of blogged wines in the form of a wine widget or an XML Feed. Check out the widget displaying my blogged wines (to the right) for an example.

There are a number of other improvements and new features around the site, but this post is getting long so I’ll let you explore and find them on your own. We’re very excited about the new features, the blogging features in particular, and would love to hear what you have to say, so leave a comment or shoot us an email.

Last Friday we quietly added a new (beta) mapping feature to Vino2Vino.com. The interface is based on Google’s wonderful maps API which allows you to easily include maps of the entire globe on any publicly available website. On top of Google maps, we’ve placed markers for over 1,100 geocoded wineries. You can easily explore all of these wineries on a single page, without being overwhelmed, thanks to clustering that occurs at higher zoom levels (see the screen shot on the right, which shows a map of Napa Valley). If you click on a cluster, an info window pops up showing the address and contact information for any wineries the cluster covers (note that it may take a few seconds for an info window to pop up for large clusters - we’re working on improving the speed).

Map thumbnails appear on the winery page for geocoded wineries, in the right side bar (full maps also appear on certain region pages, like Napa Valley). Clicking the marker on a map thumbnail will load a larger map overlay showing the surrounding geographic region along with any nearby wineries. From there you’re free to explore the entire world!

Here are a few examples of how the Vino2Vino virtual wine labels are generated.

2002 Three Hills Shiraz

2004 Feudi di San Gregorio Falanghina Sannio

2004 Ferrari Carano Fumé Blanc

So, in case you haven’t noticed (or haven’t been here before), Vino2Vino.com got a new logo and some new graphics today (mmm, gradients). The changes are subtle, but I think it’s a big improvement!

The site got some less obvious enhancements as well. We’ve made some backend optimizations that should speed up the load time for many pages, and we’ve added RSS feeds on the home page. You can subscribe to feeds for recently updated, best values, and top rated wines on Vino2Vino.com. Keep an eye out for more feeds to come, including personalized feeds for your wine lists.

Be sure to check back frequently this week. I’m back from spring break and ready to roll, so things will be happening fast.