Stogie Rate News, June 2012

Greetings again from StogieRate.com!

Well, Spring came and went and now the hot hot Summer is here. We hope everyone out there is spending some time relaxing with friends and family and also enjoying some favorite cigars.

Our Latest Cigar Giveaway

With the close of Spring, we also closed out our Spring Cigar Giveaway. The winners have been notified and their cigars shipped out. We would like to take a moment to publicy acknowledge the winners here.

Our grand prize winner (which was a box of Macanudo 1968 Robustos) was...

• Networkcacher

Our 5-pack winners were...

• Consigliere
• fretburn
• JeffyB
• mbetot
• brob49r

So, congratulations to all the winners! We had such a great response to this contest that we are planning to do another one very soon and give more people an opportunity to snag some free cigars.

What's New at StogieRate.com

In addition to the contest, we have continued to work on the web site in an effort to make it more useful.  Below are a list of a few of our recent updates to the site.

1. Auto-save on reviews - This feature has been requested several times and it is now up and running on StogieRate.com.  When writing reviews, the text that you have written will be automatically saved every few seconds in case you accidentally navigate away from the site or close your web browser before you finish.  You will know when your review has been saved by a small pop-up message that will appear below the review text area (see picture below).  If you DO lose a review in progress, you can restore it by simply choosing to review the same cigar over again and when the review writing screen appears, your previous text and ratings will be restored.

2. Easier inventory increment/decrement - Previously, when you wanted to update your remaining stock, you had to type the new value into the input text box and then press Enter. To save time, now +/- buttons will appear next to the input text box and the inventory may be incremented or decremented using these (note: you can still type the value directly into the text box as well).

3. Cigar information links - We have expanded our cigar database to now include links to the official web sites for cigars. These links are labeled "Official site" and can be viewed both from the cigar detail pages or from the search results page (see picture below). While many cigars in our database now have these links, we are still in the process of updating our cigar records where possible. We hope that folks will find these links useful when trying to find out more information about the cigars.

And that's it for this update! We will be back soon with more news about our next cigar giveaway, as well as what new enhancements we are cooking up for the site. As always, we love to hear feedback on how we can improve the site, or if you encounter any issues using it. Please drop us a line via our Contact Page.

Until next time, happy cigar smoking!

Stogie Rate News, April 2012

Stogie Rate has been humming right along so we thought that we would take a pause and provide a quick news update to hit the recent highlights and let everyone know what is in the pipeline. (Oh yes -- and we might have word of a great cigar giveaway coming your way soon! Check below for more details...)

A quick look at where the site is today and where it came from.

First of all, StogieRate.com is now over a year old and the site continues to grow on all fronts! It's very cool to think that a little over a year ago, the site was launched, and it was really in just a prototype stage. From that starting point, the site has gone through many updates and enhancements, and it now tracks the cigar inventory for hundreds of users and nearly 22,000 cigars. It's hard to imagine what all those cigars would look like stacked together, but it would be a beautiful sight. They would, no doubt, fill a small warehouse! We are looking forward to continuing to build on our current set of inventory tools with an eye on our overall goal of making cigar inventory fun and easy.

Secondly, we continue to curate and keep the Stogie Rate cigar database up to date. While site members continue to add cigars, the Doc from Stogie Fresh also does an amazing job of adding new cigar records along with new cigar and cigar band photos, which we hope make identifying cigars much easier to do. Also, thanks to the Doc we were able to launch the site a year ago with over 5,500 different cigar lines in it, and today this number has grown to nearly 7,600!

Thirdly, StogieRate.com now serves as the exclusive repository for high quality Stogie Fresh cigar reviews, which you can view every week in the Latest Reviews section of the StogieRate.com home page. You can also conveniently search and browse all of the Stogie Fresh reviews via the Review Database page on our sister site, StogieFresh.info, powered directly by the Stogie Rate review database.

And finally, the traffic to the site keeps climbing to the point where we are looking at ways to increase the speed and efficiency of the web site. We're certainly not complaining about this problem, and we want to provide our service to as many people as possible, so we will be looking at innovative ways to keep the site running as fast as possible.

Cigar giveaway

On a closing note, and as was mentioned at the beginning of this news post, yes, we will be doing a new cigar giveaway in the very near future, so keep your eye on the site for details. We will also send out an email notification to all of our members before we start the giveaway.

That's all for now. We will be back soon with another update detailing some of our most recent enhancements to the site, so until next time, happy cigar smoking!

HOW-TO: Add a new cigar size to the database

This article is the first of several short how-to's that we will post over the coming months. We want to help you learn more about what features are available at StogieRate.com as well as learn how to best take advantage of them. In this first installment, we will take a look at the scenario where you look up a cigar, but discover that the specific size (or vitola) that you are looking for is not in the database. Registered users of StogieRate.com can add cigar records, and we will demonstrate how to do this.

First, suppose that you are looking for a particular cigar. The quickest way to find a cigar is to simply type the name in the search box on the home page and hit Search. 

In our example, we search for the Rocky Patel Cargo cigar and discover that the database is missing a vitola (there should be a Toro Grande size in addition to the Toro). 

To fix this, first we need to open the cigar's detail page by clicking on the cigar name ("Cargo" in this case). The detail page for the Cargo cigar displays the list of vitolas currently in the database, below which we see "Are we missing a size?"

Following the link to add a new size, a new screen will open where you can type in the name of the specific size that you want to add as well as its length and ring gauge. To save you time, Stogie Rate will copy the country of origin, wrapper, and other related fields from one of the cigar's vitolas that is already in the database. (However, you can still modify any of these fields if you wish.)

And that's it!  Once you are satisfied with the cigar information, click the Add button and now your new cigar vitola will be available for you to use as well as your fellow StogieRate.com  users. (And as you can see we now have both sizes of the Rocky Patel Cargo in the database.)

We'll be back again with more tips so stay tuned!

December, 2011 - StogieRate.com Update

Since our debut in February of 2011, we have been rolling out feature after feature to make StogieRate.com the very best cigar inventory and review site on the web. We sacrificed looks in favor of developing what's under the hood. But now we have brought the look and feel of the site to the next level. We hired a graphic designer to revamp the entire look and feel of the site and, we think you'll agree, the results are impressive.

But that doesn't mean we are forgetting about the features. Along with the new look, we will also be streamlining and enhancing our functionality over the coming weeks and months. Our goal is to make the site as fast and easy to use as possible. You will also notice that there will be a closer connection between StogieRate.com and StogieFresh.info. We plan on leveraging each other's strengths to bring you the best of the best. Stogie Fresh is well-known in the industry for providing top-flight cigar education and resources. We will be connecting our StogieRate.com members to the new Stogie Fresh site via links directly to Stogie Fresh resources. On the other hand, Stogie Fresh will be depending on the superior database functions of StogieRate.com to provide a slick and powerful new interface for searching the Stogie Fresh reviews.

These are just some of the new and exciting things you will see at Stogie Rate. And, we intend to keep on rolling…. After the first of the year, you will see more contest and cigar giveaways, more new features and continual evolution as we strive to bring you the web's next "killer app."

All of us at StogieRate.com would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We look forward to reading your reviews and sharing more great features with you in the new year.

September 3rd, Stogie Rate Cigar Giveaway Winners!

As promised, we have selected 5 members who have written reviews on StogieRate.com between August 15th and September 3rd, and they will each receive an assorted 5-pack of cigars. Thank you to everyone who participated. There have been many terrific cigar reviews written recently, so keep up the good work!

 

Congratulations to our winners...

• ckgdrums
• vinnydisilvio
• BrianS
• Foe
• JB_Anderson

We hope that you enjoy the cigars, and will continue to enjoy the web site.
We'll be back with more updates soon, and until then, happy cigar smoking!

Review a Torpedo - Win a 5-pack!

It's been over a month since we last did a cigar giveaway. So, here we are with a new one!

As last time, the rules are simple.

1. Be a Stogie Rate member.
2. Write a review for any Torpedo shaped cigar.
3. On the weekend of September 3rd, we will randomly select 5 winners who will each receive an assorted 5-pack of cigars!

That's it! Good luck and we will see you on the web site.

Site updates - Humidor improvements and more

Since it has been a couple of weeks since we've posted an update, we would like to take a minute to highlight a few of our recent updates to the site. Our most recent updates are aimed squarely at making the lives easier for those of you storing very large collections of cigars.
We have several more enhancements currently in the works and will post another update once they are ready. As the amount of information that we store is growing, we are also considering new ways of tying the information together to enhancement its usefulness and make it easier to navigate.
As always, we love hearing feedback, and the best way to get the site working the way you want is to let us know!

Site Updates

• Both of the Dashboard and Humidor screens may now be sorted. For example, in the Dashboard view you can now sort your highest rated cigars from top to bottom.
• Both of the Dashboard and Humidor screens may now be searched with keywords. You can now look up your cigars via: Brand Name, Cigar Name, Size Name (e.g. Robusto, Toro etc.), Wrapper Type, and Collection Name. Simply type one or more key words into the text box and hit the Find button.
• We have added a new Collection Manager screen (accessible via the Tools drop down menu within the Humidor screen.) This screen allows you to add, delete, or rename your collections.
• We added an Edit Review button directly to the Review page for users viewing their own reviews. This saves you the time of needing to navigate to the My Reviews page. You will still need to use the My Reviews page to delete reviews however.
• If you see that we are missing a cigar size, you can now add the size to the Stogie Rate database directly from the cigar's detail page by clicking the link directly below the Available Vitolas list. Example cigar page.
• We revamped the FAQ page to be easier to use. We will be expanding the help topics listed in the FAQ in the near future as well.
• Bug Fixes: We fixed a bug affecting Internet Explorer users that would periodically double post a review or add a duplicate humidor entry when adding new cigars. We also fixed a bug in the Dashboard screen that periodically caused a few of the records to not display.

That's all for now. We hope that you will find these updates useful and enjoy using the site. Until next time, happy cigar smoking!