Blog Archive: Tech updates

We're always evolving, adapting and tweaking our website and wanted to keep a record of some of our changes. Not only for transparency in our work load, but to highlight the improvements we are constantly making and to give you readers an open ended view of what we've done to try and make this website the best it can be. Also it's nice to give our developer/s (i.e. me) a little pat on the back with some lovely publicly viewable 'I've done this' list .... good work me!

26th May 2022

Just rewrote the MyBar code for our app, taking the time to work out an individuals MyBar from around 4-10 seconds (!!!) to around 1/2 second. Whoop whoop!
Reconfigured the Facebook login process and meta app. This may result in some users having to re-start their profile with facebook logins. Contact us if this is the case.

23rd May 2022

Its done. We’ve finally finished and imported. We’ve gone through EVERY SINGLE one of the recipes on our website, and updated all their descriptions, recipes, ingredients and more. This has been a massive undertaking to get everything correct on the site, but it’s all finally done for you all!

14th April 2022

Just a short one today – fixed a heap of spelling errors in our ingredient list. Its the first step in a site cleanup we’re doing

3rd December 2021

We no longer work out MyBar in such a short period of time, meaning quicker access to cocktails for frequent users

18th May 2021

We’ve cleaned up the home page slider to free up some screen
Sorted out the slider core item (was using a Christmas list all the time)
Fixed a icon dispay size when using JWT token re-signon

22nd March 2021

We’ve removed all public profiles while we work on tying down how this could work while keeping everyones privacy
Reworked some sitemap bits and a few missing images

2nd February 2021

We’ve rolled out 7 app updates since our launch, including ingredient measurement switching, ignoring home ingredients, lots of tweaks and bug squishes and more. The app is slowly becoming more and more streamlined. We had a few teething bugs but are hopefully at a much smoother point now.
Fixed an error on activity showing multiple activities by the same user
Small header UI fix for JWT token login switching
Switched over any Christmas orientated messages to more relevant ones
Started work offline on a new admin interface for members – will be a few months but we’re excited about this

9th December 2020

We’ve been super busy here and 90% of our time has been spent writing all the API code for the new shiny iOS app. It’s launched and working nicely (we hope).
New header and footer links and icons for the app / app store
Fixed some list image issues for premium lists
New app page (here)
Put the ground work in for users favouriting their lists
For all ~3500 recipes, we’ve grammar checked every method and background. Added garnish information and tasting notes. These will slowly be rolled out across the site
Fixed an unsubscribe issue from admin area
Fixed some admin area bugs surrounding deleting members and removing information
Database reader / writer issues fixed in various places
Updated the support page with new costs and wording to reflect current nature of the business
Some email template tweaks for new app and book
Various smal display tweaks

27th October 2020

Launched our new book so updated all links and images on the site and transactional emails to reflect this
Support page unsubscribe from supporting us text
Host of error checks on object creations in php
Changed our security plugin for some blog bits to update to newer versions. We were running into intermittent issues

2nd July 2020

We’ve just tweaked some performance bits, moving ad loading to the bottom instead of the head (oops sorry about that)
We’ve also added some webp to some common elements
Added some width / height to help with CLS (content layout shift) for users

29th May 2020

Added a separate reader to our DB cluster, so we can scale horizontally on the database better. Changed a heap of our SQL calls over to the reader as needed. Will help with speed, reliability, and ability to scale as needed. Win win win!

28th May 2020

Dark mode / light mode toggle is now instant and not a page reload (mostly allowed due to the icon work previously)
Some cross-browser display bugs squished (mostly safari and width display: inline-block issues)
Added a few more verbs to highlight in method
Added google guided recipe schema for multiple step methods. This is the start of a larger project for us
Fixed some php internal warnings that were being logged (log files were getting silly)
Added some preloads and preconnects to speed up delivery of google fonts as well as the ad network
Set heigh restrictions for ads, allowing us to set the height in css to remove page jank
Started work on a recipe cleanup

19th May 2020

We’ve spent the last few days completely changing over our icon set, not just the actual look / feel, but the way the underlying tech loads them in.
All icons are in svg now for crystal clear over all dpi’s / resolutions etc
Changed over some core colour choices, especially relevant over results checkboxes and filters
A whole host of small UX / alignment / placement tweaks
Some bugs squashed, such as filtering in lists
Ordering of lists on cocktail page is more relevant / less skewed to name of the list
Quite a bit of code cleanup and removal – less bytes down to you, and more efficient js execution

17th May 2020

Added CTA on dark mode toggles if on lightmode and not switched
Added and finalised new book page – our new book is live!
Added a few analytic calls to help understand how our site is being used, and thus being able to adapt as needed
Some robots.txt tweaks
Started work on new icon set implementation (we’ve had new icons for ages, but taken a while to start the implementation site wide)
Changed sizing and look on tech update blog archive page

11th May 2020

Been working offline on a new book so prepared the site for that.
Changed the core book page and created a new secondary level book page
Resolved an infrastructure issue allowing shared sessions instead of per server level
Resolved a cloudfare cache issue meaning all statis assets are now loading super quick for you
Few textual amendments

1st May 2020

Redesigned and launched new registration emails
MyBar styling on mobile altered to be more obvious when adding an ingredient
Changed the Top 50 eBook over to be more accurate and unified
Media page added
Scroll to top doesn’t activate when closing search
My Lists page changed to be properly aligned on mobile
Few advert tweaks to stop jank and space for people with adblockers

20th April 2020

Well where to begin ….. we’ve moved out whole infrastructure over to AWS due to massive demands
We’ve had to remove a few filters on recipe results due to their overheads, we’re looking at re-introducing them shortly
A heap of textual tweaks and link placements
We’ve had to add adverts onto the site to help with paying for the maintenance costs
Support page highlighting
Moved over major emailing to Amazon SES as the numbers were costing us too much on Mandrill
Tweaked the top 50 book
Changed the UX for the popup of the modal window for new users. Loads nicer now
We’ve had to remove Add a Recipe for now while we resolve image uploading
Altered some cache settings
Moved from Stackpath to Cloudfare
Lightbox on MyBar appears over the top of fullscreen views
Changed ‘no cocktail’ images to blue instead of that old brown
Completely streamlined the MyBar cocktail generation scripts. 1000% faster and less SQL intensive
Changed the way MyBar knows if you need to update the cocktails you can make to remove unecessary sql queries
And a whole heap of other incremental optimisations, tweaks and changes that we’ve missed out on this list.
Thanks for sticking with us during this massive transition period.

16th March 2020

After such massive changed pre and post Christmas, it’s been a month of small incremental changes. We’ve altered the home page to remove some social bits (and loading them – no more tracking from there).
Tweaked MyBar on lightmode on fullscreen, to be ore obvious to close to non-fullscreen.
Some visual changes for darkmode
Added a few CTA’s in the advertising pages, and also amended the copy there slightly
Worked on a email creation tool to speed up the process for our bi-weekly ingredient deep dive
Rewrote the way that some pages and elements are cached, to speed up performance and deliver pages quicker
Removed old hrecipe elements, as we’re now using ld+json and hrecipe was interfeering
A host of textual changes

13th February 2020

Since December we’ve made literally hundreds and hundreds of small tweaks in performance, usability, standardisation in the UX, accessibility, page layout changes and more. Too many to list here from htaccess updates, image transformations, file size reductions, background colour alterations, border tweaks, page redesigns and more
Added a whole new book section which we’ll add to once we add more books.
Completely re-done the advertising section with the ability to purchase email adverts
Blog section has had quite a bit of rework done on layout and sizing of elements
Really a whole host of small updates to make the site faster, slicker and more fun to use

3rd December 2019

Too much to say in one tech update, but basically a complete site design overhaul – and along with that hundreds of bug fixes and so many new bits of functionality, and a much faster slicker site. This was a culmination of around 1/2 years work and one we’re really proud of.

12th August 2019

Currently working on a completely new site and thus tech updates to current site are slower than usual

10th April 2019

Completely updated scripts to all new versions on site including:
- jQuery
- Isotope
- Lazyload
- Lodash
- GMaps
Added instant.page and quicklink to site
Reworked js loading mechanism to not load files on certain pages
Created new sponsorship page and configured all payment systems
Rewrote code to be PHP 7.2, PHP 7.3 compliant, and allow faster local development time
Updated server to PHP 7.3
Fixed some old js bugs such as list layout on slower devices and other small snags
Removed some old code that was no longer needed / used