The Bar Towel

Hopefully many of you saw the email come through today about a new feature at drinkvine, called lists. This is an idea which is almost two years in the making, has taken quite a bit of development time, and something I'm hopeful provides some value to each of you. drinkvine has been a labour of love and a source of great pride watching it grow and hearing how its used all over the province. That said, shortly after it launched I had two children, a new job and a homebrewing obsession. That meant that updating drinkvine fell on the priority list. About two years ago we picked new volunteers - and our updates were better than ever before. Last year our main volunteer got a job as a brewer and his spare time tapered off as well. All of this to say that keeping drinkvine updated has been more difficult than we anticipated!

The good news is that lists are now a way for anyone to create content on drinkvine. Rather that posting new beers in the comments, you have the ability to maintain a list of the latest releases. The products you list, their icons and the descriptions are yours to craft. Other users can post comments on your list as well, giving you feedback about what they agree or don't agree with. Also, you'll be able to see just how many users have added your list to their account.

My hope is that lists will evolve on their own, and we'll see some interesting ideas about how products can be grouped together, and a new generation of contributors to drinkvine.

Please take a look if you already haven't and post here if you have some feedback about what you like, don't like or what you think could be improved.

Thanks!

Great feature! Very useful. Really looking forward to seeing what lists people come up with...

A question, how come the drinkvine list is different from the lcbo? Seems they follow the vintages listing and not the lcbo?

A better question is why does the lcbo and vintages lists differ? But that's probably answered best by, "because it's the LCBO"...

Example 1: the lcbo.com lists Lake Effect in cans, DV and Vintages do not.
Example:, the lcbo shows stock for the Bastard Box, DV and Vintages do not.

Is drinkvine dead?

I have not seen it updated since last year,

Drinkvine is a pet project of someone on here. It's not commercial in any sense. Life gets in the way.

I wish I understood techhy codey stuff better so that I could help out.

I'm sure if anyone wanted to help out more and add drinks, lists, etc. contact the main guy. He would probably welcome the help.

Ralphus wrote:Last year our main volunteer got a job as a brewer and his spare time tapered off as well. All of this to say that keeping drinkvine updated has been more difficult than we anticipated!

cfrancis wrote:Drinkvine is a pet project of someone on here. It's not commercial in any sense. Life gets in the way.

I wish I understood techhy codey stuff better so that I could help out.

I'm sure if anyone wanted to help out more and add drinks, lists, etc. contact the main guy. He would probably welcome the help.

It's not much techhy codey stuff to update the lists. The volunteer in question was me... I used to be so on-point with those updates man. Man. Anyway, for me Folly Brewpub got in the way of updating the lists. I'd email Ralph about updating the lists if your interested. It's just a particularly formatted text document that needs to be updated. Looks something like

600404 (LCBO ID)
Beer Name
link to image file
/$pirce for xxx mL
Some words

It just takes time to track down images and descriptions for everything and format the text file. But it's really not technically hard.