Added a direct link to “Newest additions” in the recipe library section—this invokes the “Browse All” but sorted from more recent to least recent.
Implemented a more prominent presentation of favorites/likes/dislikes on the recipe page.
Been doing lots of keywording and content clean-up work behind the scenes.
Two recent deployments:
First, Stories are evolving. (They’ll probably get a new name, too, once we find one we don’t hate.) The changes are fundamentally presentational, but we’re also starting to figure out what they are (and aren’t).
We’ve already got a pretty good set of these comparative presentations for the Total Tiki content. We’re just getting started on the cocktail content.
Second, we’ve deployed the first generation of our “similar recipes” feature. This is still experimental, and for now we’re only showing it on Total Mixology, not Total Tiki Online. Basically, you navigate to any recipe, and at the bottom there may (or may not) be a presentation like that below, listing similar recipes from a common-ingredient perspective.
These lists are analytically-defined, and these recipes don’t necessarily have any historical relationship, but it’s an interesting way to surf through objective parallelisms. Our approach has various shortcomings, some of which we’ve already identified. We’ll probably replace it with a superior approach down the line, but for now, there’s value here.
For a while now, recipes on TTOL/TM have listed their Standard Drinks scores (based on the USA standard—I can add other standards if there’s demand). I’ve now also added Units of Alcohol:
I’ve just deployed two related new features for recipe lists:
These are what I would call “minimum viable” implementations, but I think I got the intent right. Basically, you can create a list of recipes—say, for a party—and then Total Tiki Online/Total Mixology will give you a leg up on creating both a menu for the party and a spec sheet (“cheat sheet”/“crib sheet”) for use behind the bar. For each, there’s a template you can edit, and then you can download a docx (Microsoft Word) file that has paragraph and character styles already set up so you can easily stylize the document to taste.
There’s a lot more I could do with these, but I plan to wait for some customer feedback before elaborating them much more.
We’ve been testing a design cleanup-and-overhaul on Total Mixology for a couple weeks. Today, the updates were applied to Total Tiki Online. Lots and lots of little changes in service to better mobile support and making future development easier. The main “marquee” feature is there’s now a dark mode for them that wants it.
Added a new presentation for recent recipe additions to the database. An excerpt is now included in the news feed with links to the full list there and in the main menu.
The private recipe edit form now includes two additional fields flanking the recipe body field: Text before recipe and Text after recipe. These are boxes to (optionally) add verbiage before and/or after the body of the recipe. Unlike the body of the recipe, these fields are disregarded by the Autotemplate feature.
Iterative work on autotype category logic, focusing on the collins family. Tricky stuff, but we’re slowly tightening the bolts.
New base ingredient keywords added: coffee, tea and beer
Happy to report that the recipes from Wondrich’s Index of Punch have made their way to Total Mixology (with @Splificator’s blessing, of course), split across new historical and contemporary collections. Accomplishing this has required some conservative expansion of the available syntax for batch drinks. I’m fairly pleased how it went, although batch recipe handling still feels a little undercooked to me. In any case, the new syntax appears adequate to support the calculations and keywording requirements of this seminal assortment of recipes.
Today, I deployed the first iteration of the dreaded (by me) hamburger menu.
I never wanted to do this, but it has become clear that customers really really want to use Total Tiki Online and Total Mixology on their phones. So, now every page gets the burger. Even on tablets and desktop. So now you can get just about anywhere from anywhere without going to the home page. Moreover, phone users will now see the news feed on the home page.
It’s better this way.
We’ve begun experimental support for slushy machine recipes in Total Mixology. There are a few examples up (see “slushy machine” keyword). For now the essentials are: batch recipes only, ingredients must wind up in the --mixing vessel-- context, and then terminated with the “Freeze in slushy machine” syntax component.
