ThePortForum.com

This is probably not the thing to do when just having joined a forum such as this, but here we go:

I've just been looking through the tasting notes for the vintage ports - you know, the one where my notes on the Martinez 1985 would have been if my silly computer hadn't flipped on me? There are five pages, and the ports are all over the place (presumably in the order they were posted?). I wanted to read about the other Martinez (Harveys) 1985 posting, and all comments on Noval Nacional, but it was a bit of a trawl to find them.

So here we go, my suggestion after literally a day or so's membership is that a cross reference table might be a handy thing. Years along the top, houses down the side, links to TNs in the cells, and more than one per cell when required. This could live in a different place to the TN pages, or perhaps be the front page, but it would enable the interested browser to quickly find comments on a given port and year.

I acknowledge that this is probably a stack of a lot of programming for someone to do, but am blissfully unaware of the details.

Gahndi

Yep - that would be lovely. Sadly, it needs time, effort and a lot of diplomacy with the 'programmer'. It also may mean being outside of the phpBB forum that is currently our home page.

For the moment, the Search facility does do a really nice job.

I'm not actually saying "No, you can't have it", just not necessarily and certainly not by tomorrow.

Oooh, look, there's a search facility. That does seem to do a rather good job, doesn't it?

I always feel you shouldn't ask folk to do things you wouldn't do yourself, unless it's blatantly their job to do them. This site is obviously run for the general edification and amusement of the participants by a nice person who gives up time to make our lives better. I'm not sure I'd fancy the programming, even if able, so I'll shut up now.

Until I think of another dippy question to ask.

Actually, I could make a spreadsheet that did that with reasonable ease. From time to time I could add data (that is, TN threads to it) and re-upload. Hmmm: maybe a project for this weekend.

The table format requires a finite number of houses: so real ports only (i.e., not this).

How do I label the contents of the cells? Obviously there’d be a little piece of hover text giving author and date, but the text itself would be what?

Or we could have a locked thread, that only admin can edit, at the top of the TNs.

• Taylor:
  • 1908:
    • JDAW, March 2007, June 2007;
    • Another 1908
  • Another Taylor
• Fonseca:
  • …
  • …
• Noval Nacional:
  • …
  • …
  …

? (The two dates are drinking date and posting date.)

Well since you've asked, I'd stick with the table format (triffic idea, whoever it was), and the text of the cell entries would be the date of the tasting(s). If you can do a hover to reveal the author, all well and good (bordering on showing off), but you'd be able to see at a glance the port, the year, and the date(s) it was tasted. Sorted.

But, Mr Admin, Sir, your search engine is brill. Sir.

Admin: is it easy for you to send me a list of TN threads in a flat-file format: their titles; authors; first post dates; and thread numbers? It’s some work to screen-scrape this information, and you can probably get to it easily? Thank you.

We'll have to take a look at the database format to see how it's held. I can play with databases and should be able to achieve this if we can recognise the format.

I'll just pitch in with my comments that I would love to have a searcheable TN database of some type.

If anyone volunteers to do the work of putting one together, I keep all of my tasting notes from the last 2-3 years in an Excel spreadsheet and would happily send a copy over. I have the "screen scraping" problem in reverse in that I have to find the time one day to take each individual TN and copy and paste it into the current TN forum. Being able to send the entire spreadsheet to someone for inclusion into a searcheable database that is then hosted on the web somewhere would be great. Its one of the things that I have really hoped Roy would be able to prioritise, I think (hope?) its on his list of things to do but I don't think its yet at the top of the list.

Alex

Admin: as well as sending me what we have; can I send you what AHB has for auto-thread-making?