Vinismo is written by its readers -- Internet users like you -- and we need your help! Try our getting started guide to learn how.
Please add new questions at the bottom of the page and sign your post by appending four tildes (~~~~) to it, so that we know who you are and when you showed up at the Bar. See, I just did it here : niko - vinismo 20:05, 16 June 2007 (EDT)
edit Looking good
Hey! I just wanted to mention that the page layout and design elements here look absolutely fantastic. Well done!
I have a couple of little nitpicky things though.
- the edit button is sometimes a little hard to see
- it took my quite a while to find the "discussion" link... maybe the page info links could go somewhere more obvious
...but in general this site looks fantastic! -- Mark 11:17, 18 July 2007 (EDT)
- Oh, cool! Glad you like it. As you may have noticed, there's an "edit" link in that black fuzzy mass around the page title. We need to move it somewhere more readable. Maybe that'd be a good place to put the discussion link, too...? --Evan 17:43, 18 July 2007 (EDT)
- I don't think you have to move it... you can just make it pink instead of red, say, ffefef or something. -- Mark 02:33, 19 July 2007 (EDT)
- Actually you have to roll over it for it to become super-black and super-visible. Maybe we should tone up the default grey a bit. As for the discussion link, well, all comments are welcome, since it's one of our experimentations on the MediaWiki default menu... maybe we should make it more proeminent. niko - vinismo 00:31, 25 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Problems in Explorer
I'm browsing from work on a PC running Explorer and it's having a really hard time with the formatting of the pages. I looked at it in Firefox and it's great. I can send you a screencapture of the Explorer window if you want.
Moboid 18:04, 24 July 2007 (EDT)
- Yeah, we're having some kind of terrible catastrophe on the IE side... seconds after we do a beta release. It'd be great to get a screenshot! --Evan 19:31, 24 July 2007 (EDT)
- IE is horrible for now. Just be patient. IE 6 just has been (kind of) fixed tonight. I mean, it's functional. For it to be beautiful, it's another story. We have work to do, thanks to MS. niko - vinismo 00:32, 25 July 2007 (EDT)
- I sent Evan an IE7 screen shot yesterday. Today it looks great. Well done guys! IE 7 and MS suck, trust me I know... almendelsohn
edit Navigation
I'm chiming in to say you guys did a real bangup job on look and feel of the site! I'm having some trouble figuring out how to navigate, tho -- specifically like how to browse to a particular wine. For instance, I'd like to be able to go to, say, click Argentina and then see all the Malbecs, then browse them... On wine pages it would be good to have something about price, and where to buy. I'm just thinking along the lines of how I want to use a wine guide. I want to find a wine that sounds real tasty within my budget, compare it to some others, and then figure out where to get it. -- zcopley 18:56, 24 July 2007 (EDT)
- That's interesting! Our navigation right now is geographical all the way down to the winery, and then we go at it by type of wine. But it makes a lot of sense to be able to negotiate to things like "Canadian Rieslings" or "New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc". Let's push this off to Vinismo talk:Geographical hierarchy.
- I also agree that we need to have some price information on the wine pages, but it gets really tricky, since prices are so location-sensitive. A wine that's available for $31 in California might cost $50 in New York and some completely random number in London or Sydney. How are we going to handle this...? Let's discuss on Vinismo talk:Wine pages. --Evan 19:38, 24 July 2007 (EDT)
edit New layout is broken in Konqueror
It used to work, but now things are not looking so good. The navigation is shoved down really low under everything else, and the center column is kindof cut off. -- 158.232.2.32 11:04, 25 July 2007 (EDT)
- It's still busted. If you like I can have a look at the CSS and try to see what's up. I know that I can just run Firefox and it will work, but I don't really want to use up all of that memory, considering I've already got Konqueror running. -- Mark 03:24, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- We're still trying to get around IE problems, then we'll deal with Konqueror. I'm not sure any of us has KDE on his box, but we'll find a way. By the way, Vinismo looks great in Safari which is based on Konqueror - correct me if I'm wrong - so that's strange. niko - vinismo 13:11, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- It is, but it's understandable. Webkit (Safari) has diverged a bit from KHTML (Konqui). The two teams are working on a re-merge right now. -- Mark 17:23, 29 July 2007 (EDT)
edit couple of comments
Things I want: -price point (how to deal with geographical differences?) -famous wine expert ratings (Robert Parker, Wine Spectator)
Also, I have not fiddled too much, but getting a single wine into the system, actually requires a fair bit of detective work to get all the IsIn's working etc... I guess this can all happen after the fact? Hugh 12:30, 25 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Wine tours, wine tasting, festivals, research+education
First, congratulations Evan and Niko on launching Vinismo! It looks great!
I would like to see articles mention, where appropriate, the availability of tasting rooms at vineyards, location, hours of operation, fees, etc.
Also, what about festivals related to wines? Often these provide rare opportunities to try many different wines and to pick up some bargains.
Finally, this may become a great place for links to viticulture research and educational programs in universities and other institutions. Stavp 01:18, 26 July 2007 (EDT)
- Welcome to Vinismo and thank you for your contributions! We are indeed thinking about ways to integrate all entertainment activities related to wine, and even local guides to find wine stores or wine bars. As for your first idea, the template for wineries has been changed to integrate a "visits" section where all these details can be added. niko - vinismo 11:52, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- Wow! Great suggestions. I'd like to start having some geographical pages, so you could read Palo Alto to find nearby wine bars, restaurants with good wine lists, wine festivals and wine tastings... I think Niko added a "tastings" section to the winery pages, and... other stuff.
- Thanks again for the congratulations! There's lots more to come. --Evan 17:08, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
edit few comments + awesome!
awesome guys! congrats
few comments: 1.) can you add "dietary notes" to the wine template so people can add if a wine is vegetarian/vegan/halal/kosher, if it has animal products, what preservatives etc. 2.) recommendations is spelt the french way in the english wine template 3.) when i upload images the site gets funky looking (see http://vinismo.com/common/Images - credits and catch phrase variables don't work)
--oceanpark 02:39, 26 July 2007 (EDT)
- 1) I was looking for a word to use for that. Dietary notes. That's great. I'll add it to the Quick facts template today. 2) I'll fix that too. Lots of things have to be updated in the wine template, there'll be a major update today. 3) Yeah, this should be fixed soon... Vinismo Common is another site, it has its own Vinismo version like the French version for example. niko - vinismo 10:41, 26 July 2007 (EDT)
- I wrote "recommendations". That's the right English syntax right ? niko - vinismo 18:53, 26 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Wine template update
The wine template has been changed to reflect your requests. The major change is that from now on, wine pages will be created for each and every vintage. A 2002 and a 2003 wine of the same name will be on two different pages. Differences are too important between vintages to put them all together in the same article. niko - vinismo 22:08, 26 July 2007 (EDT)
what about the wines pages that don't have vintages and use the old template? is there an easy way to convert them to the new one (all mine up to now use the old template and dont have a year) --oceanpark 06:13, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- Hey Kate - I can do the work on your pages to update them if you want - or just rename them with the vintage and you do the rest. Or do you prefer to have the option of not using the vintage? The old template is still there, in the history... niko - vinismo 09:59, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- yes please you can update them for me:) --oceanpark 00:37, 30 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Link to Wine Bar in side bar?
Especially now while things are getting set up, i find i have to poke around with 3, 4 links before I can find the wine bar... maybe a sidebar link? Hugh 09:29, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- Added a link on top of main page, in the introduction. niko - vinismo 10:00, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- I put it in the navbar, under "Project". --Evan 11:14, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Geographic Buyers' Guide
What do I want in a wine wiki? To find a good wine for Friday night. That means that the good wine I find on vinismo MUST be available in Quebec for vinismo to work for me. So: what about a (reduced) guide to "Wines available in Quebec" (and wines at LCBO) etc... This would not be exhaustive, but rather a neutralish best-of that lists wines by various criteria (cheap, big, new world, old world, value, blow the bank, stick in the cellar... or whatever)...this guide would of course link back to the wine pages in vinismo, but is likely to be much more useful for me (making me more interested in participating) than in it's current form, which requires that I know already lots about wine in order to find anything of use to me. Hugh 09:29, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- Wow. This is big, but it's another good idea we should consider. We talked of developing a whole "buying" side to the site - for now it's more producer-focused. Listing wine stores and bars by city, etc. As for listing wine availability, it's hard to do but, yeah, it's a good idea. I guess for now you can just run a search on the SAQ website... niko - vinismo 10:03, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- Oof! Knowing which wines are available in which legal jurisdictions and markets is a huge amount of data that will be really hard to keep up-to-date. And there are different levels of "availability" -- if a wine is on the shelf in Chicoutimi but not in Montreal, is it really available to you? I think it's a scary place to go down.
- That said, I think we could add some semantic data to each wine guide that would note its availability. We could do something like this:
- {{available|Quebec|easy}}, meaning that it's easy to get this wine in Quebec.
- {{available|China|very hard}} means it's possible but very hard to get this wine in China.
- {{available|North Dakota|no}} means it's just not available in North Dakota.
- {{available|Seattle|hard|only at certain BevMos, not always in stock}} gives a note about availability.
- If there's no "available" tag, that just means that we don't know about the wine's availability -- not that we're sure it's not available.
- This kind of data could really crowd up a page; however, it'll be mostly invisible unless you're doing a search. Then, you could add an extra search criterion: show me a Douro for under CDN$30 that are known to be available in Quebec. Also, availability is probably only going to be important for English-speaking countries on en:, and for French-speaking countries on fr:; it'd be rare that we'd have {{available|Heidelberg|no}} or {{available|Mali|yes}}. --Evan 11:39, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- I think you guys are looking at this from the wrong side: the data-heavy side, ie. figuring out for each wine whether or not it is available where. but I am talking about the other side of the equation, that is making a "Good Wines Available in (Location)" page... I *live* in Quebec. I *know* what is available here, because I just drank it, thought it was good/shit, and just wrote about it on vinismo.
- so what I am proposing is a page "Good Wines Available in Quebec" page, which does not require any heavy meta-data on the wine page...but which rather gets filled in by vinismo users, linking back to the wines, and contextualizes the sea of info that will be in here. absent contextualization vinismo will be an encyclopaedia of wine, which is fine, but not very useful for me if i want to choose a wine for dinner (which is what i want to use vinismo for... that and telling people about good wines to have with dinner). Hugh 11:55, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- I see. That's very simple to do, as soon as we have a system to list wine market places by region (as I said somewhere else, not overlaping with the "wine-producing regions". Still, Evan's idea is good because it sees the long term. I like the idea of exploiting the SERVICE side of a Wiki, not only a reference guide but something you can search, extract microdata from, etc. Like they say, "Think Big 'Sti !!!" niko - vinismo 12:57, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- OK I am going to take this into my own wiki hands and do something about it ;-) Guide to Wines Available Quebec ... there. I feel better. (hey, that was easy... are all wikis like this?) ... The namesapce should be something different probably, but this was just to illustrate what I mean. I would expect say 10 or so wines in each category, maybe split into several subcats (old world/new world etc). Hugh 13:14, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Local wine scene
Like Niko said, I'd love to start documenting the "wine scene" in different cities, provinces, states, countries and regions. For example, Montreal could have listings for wine bars and restaurants with notable wine lists, event listings for wine tastings and wine festivals (do we have one of these...?) as well as a description of apportez votre vin. Higher-level geographical articles like Quebec might have more general info on the SAQ, how private importation works, and where to take winery tours.
Talking about this with Niko, our big concern with this is whether and how to overlap with the geographical hierarchy we have now. It could be kind of tricky -- does Australia have information about Australian wine production, Australian wine consumption, or both? Or should we separate out this kind of "resources" listing to another article naming convention ("Wine in X") or even a namespace ("Resources:Australia")? --Evan 11:39, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- It's crucial to avoid that overlapping. I suggest to use either a specific namespace, either a specific prefix in the title : Australia Wine Market, California Wine Market or whatever. But for sure it's a great add-on to our site that would draw lots of people - as well as the Available tag if our users do have the discipline to add them systematically. niko - vinismo 11:57, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
- can we include "good wines available in (Location)" as a component of the (Location) Wine Market pages? That would solve my problem discussed above, illustrated with the temporary: Guide to Wines Available Quebec.
- The (Location) Wine Market, that was just an idea I pitched here, you're welcome to experiment anything you want. we're actually considering creating a whole new namespace or even a subdomain for the wine-buying part. niko - vinismo 21:40, 28 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Fortified Wines, etc.
Should we include fortified wines like Madeira and Port?
- Yes, absolutely! --Evan 15:59, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
edit Wiki engine upgrade
I've upgraded MediaWiki to the latest version (1.11.0), to keep up with features and behaviour on Wikipedia and other sites. Please let me know if you see any weird actions or error messages, as it probably means our custom code isn't interacting well with the new version.
One other change is that I've moved all the skins and JavaScript files over to Amazon S3, as a kind of poor man's CDN. I'm seeing slightly peppier load times, but I expect that different people will see different stuff.
Thanks! --Evan 14:37, 28 October 2007 (EDT)
edit Server changes
We moved our site today from a temporary server named riesling at the Amazon EC2 service to a more permanent place at local Montreal Web hosting provider iWeb. The new server, merlot, is considerably bigger, with more memory and space and CPU and all that good stuff.
The DNS name for vinismo.com and www.vinismo.com have changed so they no longer point at riesling, but at merlot. If your local DNS server hasn't yet updated, you may see "merlot.vinismo.com" in your address bar. This is perfectly normal and should go away after a day or two. --Evan 15:39, 25 January 2008 (EST)
edit Australia import
I've done a mass import of Australian wine producers; you can see them on Special:Recentchanges if you click "show bots". --Evan 14:57, 30 January 2008 (EST)
- I also imported all the same producers and regions to Vinismo fr:, too. --Evan 16:06, 30 January 2008 (EST)
edit Automated redirects for varietal names
I ran a quick process this morning to create redirect articles from the "other names" sections of all the varietals we have (English and French). So Zinifal and fr:Zinifal should both redirect to the proper name (Sylvaner). I think this should help with adding wines. --Evan 10:58, 9 February 2008 (EST)
- Great idea! Another problem solved. niko - vinismo 13:13, 9 February 2008 (EST)
edit nofollow
So, I added a wee bit of code to the Vinismo skin to add "rel='nofollow'" to certain internal links on the site. This tells Web crawlers from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft not to crawl, index, or rank the pages at the end of a link.
This is just for internal links -- on our site -- and just for non-crucial links. So, links to historical versions of a page are nofollow'd, as well as links to Special: pages. Links to external sites, and links to articles or project pages or user pages or talk pages or whatever, are left alone.
Wikipedia has a good article on nofollow, which I recommend. Our usage -- for non-essential internal links -- is pretty non-controversial.
Please let me know if you see any weird behavior from Vinismo. --Evan 22:46, 21 February 2008 (EST)
edit Wine Scene of the Month
So, I think the Resources:Montreal page is coming along quite nicely. I wonder if we should have a featured wine scene on the main page of the site, as we've done with featured appellations? It could be fun and interesting. I'd love to get Resources:Buenos Aires up to snuff for April. --Evan 15:26, 13 March 2008 (EDT)
- Yes, good idea. Also we need to build some kind of menu for Resources pages on the left menu. And maybe a main page for the Resources section. And a search box for the Resources namespace. Anyway, we still have time to talk about all this. Personnaly I'll be working on the Resources:Austin page. nikolai35 17:58, 13 March 2008 (EDT)
