We have finally completed the process of accurately ‘tagging’ all the articles in the site's database after weeks of (t)agonizing editing and formatting.
What is a tag?
Each article possesses a tag or tags according to its subject matter. Today’s article on Cornas, for example, was tagged ‘Rhône’ so that other articles that have also been tagged ‘Rhône’ are listed below it as ‘Related Articles’ on the webpage.
Why are they useful?
These are now fully updated and we hope you will find them useful for exploring around a particular theme, region, vintage, grape etc. These lists of Related Articles should make it much easier to access the thousands of articles that have been published since the site’s humble beginnings in late 2000. There are now well over 4,000 of them, quite apart from all the valuable content in the current members’ forum, old members’ forum (Sep 2006-Jun 2007) and your turn archive (Jan 2002-Aug 2006). We hope that you will find these tags provide valuable navigational aids to making the most of the all the information and opinion available here.
How else can I use them?
We know it can be difficult to navigate one’s way round, or even to find an article you vaguely remember. Tags can also be used as a means of 'searching' for a specific article. Occasionally you will remember the theme of an article on, say, Riesling but not enough detail for the article to become immediately apparent by simply entering ‘Riesling’ in the general search box at the bottom of the left hand menu. However, if you search for Riesling this way and then click on any article the search yields, you should often be able to browse through the Related Articles listed below it to find the one you were after.
What about other sorts of search?
As already explained, the tasting notes search has recently been beefed up considerably so that we hope you are able to get much more out of the 15,000+ tasting notes on the site using this feature. We are hoping to update the database with all the tasting notes added to the site this year very soon. At the moment, the general search does not range over the members’ forum (although it does include the old your turn). In my experience the easiest way to search both the old and current members’ forum is to use Ctrl + F, unless you remember a topic’s title or its original author, in which case, with the new format at least, you can sort the list alphabetically by either the Topic or the Author respectively and then scroll down to the relevant point.
We hope very much you find these new features useful but, as always, we welcome suggestions for continued improvements. Feel free to use the box below but if you are not a member, we'd appreciate your prefacing your comments with your name and location.