logabottle log notes

Have you noticed the new "Log Notes" at the top of the logabottle.com front page? Or the "Add a log note" link on your personal Home Page?

We added the Log Notes feature to encourage our users to share their wine thoughts with others. It's like your own personal wine blog, in addition to your wine log! You can comment about a bottle you recently tried and logged, or ask a general question, or just jot down a few thoughts about wine.

Each note will not only show up on your newly revised Home Page, but also on the front page of logabottle.com – so that all users who visit the site will see your Log Note and have the chance to comment on it.

To add a Log Note, simply go to your Home Page and click the blue "Add a log note" link, write down your thoughts, and click submit - it's that easy! We look forward to hearing what our users have to say about wine.

Wine of the month

Greetings from logabottle.com!

We have a new site features we want to tell you about today.

We are introducing a new "Wine of the Month" feature on logabottle.com. Each month, we will choose a widely-available wine and log it on logabottle.com. We encourage you to try the wine then share your tasting notes and opinions with us and other users. It's very easy to add to your bottle log - we've already logged the basic information, you just have to add your thoughts!

For January, we chose Columbia Crest's 2005 Grand Estates Merlot. This wine is traditionally a great value and shows up regularly on the Wine Spectator's list of the Top 100 Wines of the year.

Take a look here and add your tasting notes this month, and every month.

http://logabottle.com/home/wineofthemonth.php


That's all for now. As usual, please send us your comments and feedback at comments@logabottle.com or on our chat boards!

My Bottle Stats

It's been a while between updates here, but we have been improving the site all the time, just a bit lazy with the blog. A bigger addition to let you know about today.

We’ve added a My bottle Stats page which can be accessed from your My Home Page. On your new stats page you'll see your average grades overall and then broken down by wine color, grape, country, region and subregion.

We hope you'll find the stats useful, but if there's anything you think needs to be added, please respond here or at comments@logabottle.com.

More updates soon, including another in early January.

Happy Holidays and keep up the logging!

Steve, Katie and Jon

Houston, we have a forum

It’s been a while since we’ve posted here, but rest assured we have been making subtle improvements to the site for the last few months. Today we’ve made a much more major one – we’ve added a site question and answer forum.

You can get to the forum from the top navigation links on logabottle, or from one of the “active forum topics” lists you’ll find on the right side of many pages (or here).

In the forum you can post questions, and help others with answers about pretty much anything wine related, with our current topics being:

General Wine Questions
Wine Tasting Notes and Discussion
Wine Events and Wineries
Wine Deals and Values
Miscellaneous

You’ll also see Front Page Wine News in the forum. This is where you can comment on the news that gets posted to the front page of logabottle.

In the forum you’ll see users with images next to their name when they post. Remember, you can add your own image by going to My Home Page and clicking on My Profile

We’re very excited about the forum and believe it’s going to be a great resource for the whole community.

As always, please let us know your thoughts on improving logabottle, either here or at comments@logabottle.com.

Thanks! Steve, Katie and Jon

A Search Box and a New Page Layout!!!

I don’t typically use multiple exclamation points in a title, but these two additions to the site are deserving. First the simple (but powerful one):

On your My Home Page and All Logs page there is now a search box on the upper right. You can type in whatever you want to search for about a wine and see the results from all the site users. For example, type in "Cabernet", or "Mondavi 2003 Merlot", or anything. It’s a great way to find new wines and wine notes.

On the results page you can use the "sort and filter" options just like before to search even deeper. The old "sort and filter" may have been a little underwhelming to some, but the combination of "sort and filter" with the new search box is a very powerful tool. You could quickly type in "cabernet Napa" and search, and then from there filter to only see bottles with a grade higher than B+.

On your My Bottle Log Page the search box functions the same but will do a search of just your own log. For example, type in "Best Cellars" to see the wines you’ve bought at Best Cellars, or "white" to quickly see all your white wines.

Now of course the new page layout for all the logs on the site. We’ve never been totally happy with the way the site logs looked but were always very happy with all of the information quickly available because of the format we chose. We feel like we finally have a page layout that still gives all the same information (more in some cases) but looks 100% better.

There are pictures to go with bottles and users now, along with bigger fonts and an overall cleaner, clearer layout. We may still tweak things here or there, but we generally like the way things look now and think you will too. Surprisingly, there isn’t much else to say about this big change.

These two new aspects of the site are, frankly, very exciting. logabottle.com has never looked better or been easier to use.

Enjoy!

Katie, Steve and Jon

A Users page and a moved profile link

We’ve added a users page to the site, which you can now find on the main menu on all the pages. It’s a great place to see who’s new to the site, or even just who’s around. Each user is listed with:

Username
User image
Number of logs
Location
Most recent bottle logged

You can sort the listing based on a few different options on the right of that page.

Location and user image are completely optional in your user profile, but it can add a lot to the site to know someone is from a certain region. And user images really make bottle logs look nice, so I encourage everyone to upload one if they haven’t already!

These optional fields can be found in your profile, which is no longer on the main menu, but now linked from your “my home page.”

More updates to come…soon!

New front page with news and more

If you haven’t been to the site in the last day or so, you haven’t seen the new front page. We’ve added:

- News links from around the web. When we find interesting stories in online newspapers, magazines, or blogs, you can find those linked from our new home page

- A link to some great buys at wine.com – right now it’s inexpensive highly rated wines, certainly a fine combination

- Our own picks of individual bottles that we’ve tried and enjoyed so much that we're recommending them to you

We’re still tweaking here and there and we’ll post new updates here as they happen.

Two important things:

1. Please check back often for the latest news on our new front page, you’re sure to find some good reads.

2. Don’t forget to keep logging. We’ve added news, but we’re still logging bottles first!

Thanks! Steve, Katie, and Jon