Vinfolio Blog

The darling of social networking, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates in 140 characters or less. You can read about Twitter almost daily on TechCrunch and according to this Twitter Blog post, 'Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs.'

Why should you care? 

When you sign up for a Twitter account, you can post updates directly from VinCellar. Let your Twitter followers know what you're buying and drinking and link directly to your tasting notes. Once you've created an account on Twitter, simply enter your Twitter subscription details in your VinCellar My Account and start Tweeting. You can update Twitter from VinCellar in the following ways:

Get Started

Send an AUTOMATIC Tweet on the following

Add wine
From the add wine detail page check the Update Twitter box to post. 

'Added 1999 Margaux at www.vincellar.com/v/199453554'

Consume wine
From the consume wine detail page check the Update Twitter box to post.

'Consumed [sold, gifted, etc] 1999 Margaux at www.vincellar.com/v/199453554'

Tasting note
While adding a tasting note (except from consume wine) post a link to your tasting note and include a portion of your note text (up to 140 character limit).

'Tasted 1999 Margaux at www.vincellar.com/v/199453554...Tasted my retirement. Beautiful. Classic.'

After adding a tasting note you can send this same update by clicking the Twitter icon next to your tasting note on the wine detail page or by selecting 'Update Twitter' from the left action popout of the the Tasting Notes -> My Tasting Notes subtab.


Write your own CUSTOM Tweet

Click the Twitter icon in the upper right of all wine detail pages or select 'Update Twitter' from the left action popout of all My Cellar tabs to open a free text box. Create your own Tweet up to the 140 character limit. The VinCellar wine detail page link will be appended automatically. 

Follow Vinfolio on Twitter

For Vinfolio related updates follow @vinfolio, @vincellar and @vinfoliotech AND within the next couple of weeks, follow the feed of all VinCellar community notes @vintweets.

Haven't yet jumped on the Twitter bandwagon? 

As always, you can email tasting notes directly from the left action popout of the My Tasting Notes tab or from the My Tasting Notes section of wine detail pages.

With all the recent hype around social media I thought it would be interesting to devote my next few blog posts to highlighting how you can share your VinCellar activities with friends.

I'll start where we started which was by integrating with Facebook. My VinCellar on Facebook launched in 2007. Since then Facebook’s following has grown and so has the number of VinCellar users on Facebook. As a result, we’ve incorporated great feedback on how and what users want to share with friends.

With the My VinCellar application you can:

• View your friends’ recently added wines
• View your friends’ recently removed and consumed wines
• View your friends’ recent tasting notes
• Notify friends through News Feed posts of your recent activities
• Display a box on your Wall showing your recent activities
• Invite your friends to use the My VinCellar Application

Now when friends click on your VinCellar activity from their newsfeed they’ll land directly on the VinCellar wine detail page within Facebook. View producer information, market pricing, community scores and drink dates and user profiles all from within the Facebook experience. See what other users of this wine also own and buy from Vinfolio if the wine is in stock. For example, check out 1999 Guigal, E - Cote-Rotie Chateau d'Ampuis.

View this Forum post for specifics on how to add and configure the application.  If you haven’t already, get started with My VinCellar on Facebook and in the spirit of sharing, let us know what you think!  

Over the last several months we’ve been taking a hard look at performance and have been optimizing pages/actions that take longer than usual. What do we define as usual? We’ve set a benchmark of 500 milliseconds for server processing time as our high watermark.  Anything over that and we try to take a look at to see what we can do. There are some actions that are process intensive and others that depend on third parties but for the most part we should be able bring all actions down to below 500 milliseconds, ideally to around 100 – 200 milliseconds. In December we started recording how long server actions were taking in our database (these are requests for actual data, not images, CSS, or javascript). We then started improving performance for important and/or sluggish actions. One of the first we tackled was “My Cellar”:

                Month                             Avg. (milliseconds)

December 2008                 864

                January 2009                      765

                February 2009                    653

As you can see we’ve made a 20% improvement but we’re still not under the ideal benchmark of 500 milliseconds, so there’s more work to do. Also in January we installed a distributed cache for our domain objects which had the effect of reducing performance a bit. The big benefit, however, is that we now have the ability to scale by adding any number of virtual machines.

We also have made great strides on the CSS and Javascript front as well. In early February we started time stamping links to CSS and Javascript. Now those files have very long expires times and the timestamp only changes when the content inside the file changes. This results in fewer requests from your browser to our servers which improves performance (pages load much faster).

Our engineers having been reading posts on www.highscalability.com about how sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter handle scale and we’ve been applying some of the techniques with pretty good success. Stay tuned for more updates on performance improvements.

We're bigger and better than ever. Now, in addition to sharing our perspective on wine related stuff, we'll also keep you posted on new product and website features, tech updates and VinCellar "How Tos". There are lots of things happening at Vinfolio. Come by often and let us know what you think.

Also note that we do daily releases (every morning around 6 to 6:30am PST expect a little slowness from the site) so we'll be posting about those as well.