WineLog.net tasting notes indexed on Scrugy
During the most recent Wine 2.0 online chat, Jason Coleman, co-founder of WineLog, asked about using microformats for the tasting notes on WineLog and getting them indexed on Scrugy. By reviewing some of the basic hReview information on Wineformats.org and some of the wine specific class names recognized by Scrugy, Jason was able to quickly annotate some pages on WineLog to become microformat enabled. The beauty of microformats and what makes them so easy to integrate is that you can apply them to your existing markup without changing the layout or look of your pages.
The next step was to get them indexed on Scrugy. This happens one of two ways. Either the Scrugy crawler will pick them up when it periodically crawls pages on WineLog or Scrugy can pick them up from an RSS feed. The RSS feed is the better way to go, though, since it will get the most recent tasting notes indexed as the RSS feed is updated on WineLog. The crawler is somewhat random and may only periodically visit WineLog. Since Jason has an RSS feed for the latest WineLog updates, I added this feed to the ever growing list of wine-related RSS feeds that Scrugy monitors. There was one catch, though. In order for Scrugy to pick up microformats in RSS feeds, the feed items themselves must be formatted with microformats too. Since that was going to be a lot more work for Jason, I made some changes to Scrugy to follow the links (i.e. the <link> element) associated with each RSS item and check those pages for microformats. Since the pages pointed to the by links were the ones Jason had changed, Scrugy picked them just fine. So now the Scrugy crawler will detect tasting notes on WineLog as well as the Scrugy RSS feed fetcher.
So far a couple hundred tasting notes have been indexed and more are being picked up all the time. To see a list of WineLog tasting notes indexed on Scrugy, click on the following search link.
(Note: the above tasting note search is using the “site:” search field to limit results just to “winelog.net”. To do the same for any other site, just include “site:example.com” with your search. For example, to search all WineLog tasting notes that include the word “merlot”, enter “site:winelog.net merlot” (without the quotes) in the search field. Be sure to also select “tasting notes” from the search type drop-down)
Thanks to Jason for allowing WineLog’s wine reviews to be indexed on Scrugy and for formatting them with microformats. With a total of nearly 100,000 tasting notes indexed so far, the addition of WineLog will further enrich the search results for all users. Jason and I are also discussing ways to integrate Scrugy’s aggregation services on WineLog. In the end, WineLog users, Scrugy users, and the wine community will all benefit. Yet another hallmark of the web 2.0 movement.