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!