Connosr Tips and Tricks

Here’s a few things I know:

•You have to put a blank line between your lines to get proper spacing between paragraphs or between items on a list. With no blank line, your comments (and worse, lists) run together.

•If you want bullets like I’m using here, press Alt+7. That’s pretty universal (for example, it works in Excel too) and it works here like charm.

•The built-in search isn’t great. If I’m really trying to find something on Connosr, I search from Google and just include “Connosr” in my search.

•You can’t edit your posts. You can’t edit your reviews. I hear that you CAN edit your reviews’ scores. And of course you can comment on your own reviews to add to or amend your original notes.

Here’s some stuff I’d like to know:

•What’s the point of putting the @ sign before a fellow user’s name? I see that the site automatically does that when you “reply” to someone. Which is fine, but what’s the point? Their name becomes a link to their profile—is there any other purpose? I’ve (eventually) conformed to doing the @name thing like everyone else does, but I’m have no idea what the point is.

•What the point of “buddies”? I’ve received a few buddy requests but I ignored them because I didn’t see what the buddy connections actually accomplished.

@OlJas

The benefit of being a "buddy" is that you can send private messages to that person. Some people use that to set up details of meeting or trading samples, etc.... that would not be of interest to the rest of the users.

The individual product ratings and reviews on Connosr are quite useful to me. Yet there are some products not yet rated, including some bourbons. I was seeking opinions from selected Connosr members with (IMHO) extensive bourbon experiences. Some were “buddies”, some were not. The reason for reaching out to selected members was because I did not want to create a precedence of having the general discussion board populated with (potentially) endless inquiries for opinions on products already reviewed/rated. But the downside of having to have the "buddy" relationship is that without being an accepted as a “buddy”, private messaging is useless. So it's usefulness is diminished to some degree, versus being able to reach out privately (message) to any Connosr member (whether accepted as a buddy, or not). This probably should also be posted to the past thread about what improvements should be made to whiskyConnosr.

In our comments on a review of Loch Lomond of all things, @Nozinan and I just discovered that you can "almost bold" a line of text by putting an asterisk and a space at the front. I say "almost bold" because it's not really bold—it's just fully black instead of the usual dark gray. Still, it provided some subtle emphasis without doing the lovable ALL CAPS thing.

• So for example, when I typed this line, it started with an asterisk and a space before the word "So."

Boldly yours,

• Ol' Jas

Well that failed miserably. Apparently, the "almost bold" thing works only in review comments—not in discussion topics.

Unboldly yours,

Ol' Jas

You can organize the bottles in your cabinet in any order you wish--although it's a time-consuming chore to do so, especially if you have a large cabinet. When I joined Connosr in 2012, I had about two dozen bottles and I could organize things in a couple of minutes. Now that I'm up to more than 140, it takes about an hour if I want to add something to the end of the list. I wish I'd never done it in the first place, but once you start, you get a little OCD about these things. I've got them organized by category (Irish, American, Scotch) and in alphabetical order. Maybe it's because I was reared by a mother who arranged the shirts in my closet by color. ;)

If you're interested in doing it, here's the procedure:

First, add the newest bottle to your list in the usual manner.

Next, go to the page on which you want your new bottle to appear. Click the drop-down menu on the bottle you want to appear just before your latest cabinet addition, then click on "Move to my cabinet." This will move this bottle to the top of your list.

Click on Page 1 of your list, then go back to the page you just left. This seems like an unnecessary step (and it should be), but I've found that you'll freeze or confuse or scramble things if you don't do this between moving every bottle.

Working in reverse order, move every bottle to the top of your list. In other words, if you want your new bottle to appear as #25 on your list, then move bottles 24, 23, 22, 21, etc., to the top one at a time. Again, click back and forth between page 1 and your target page after each move.

Stop when your new bottle appears in its designated spot.

I don't expect anyone to be so obsessive about this, but it falls into the "tips and tricks" category, so I thought I'd share. It can actually be a pleasant and relaxing experience if you enjoy a dram and some good music while doing so.

BTW, if I move 60 bottles, Connosr will announce that "WhiskyBee just added 60 bottles to his cabinet." I often get private messages from members envious of my whisky budget. Then I have to explain things...

@WhiskyBee, I'm a little tempted to follow your footsteps, then I realize that doing sounds just like some of the more mundane task I have to do at work! So a nice one, but not one that I'll use. I know some guys use spreadsheets for their inventory (and I do too for my list of potential purchases—fun to play with), which I think must be much more flexible with columns for different attributes and the ability to sort and filter by them all.

Unrelated tip: Put three hyphens in a row to create a horizontal line that breaks apart different portions of your posts. This is great for when you want to, say, comment on @WhiskyBee's OCD and then give an unrelated formatting tip. Just as a completely random example of when you might use that.

I seemingly underlined Scotland in another thread, although my plan was to divide with a horizontal line.

No, I did in fact make the text bold. Oh well.

@Fiberfar, yeah, I see your post in the cabinet breakdown thread. So maybe you get bold if you do the hyphen thing under some text WITHOUT a blank line between?

Like this?

To compare, this line is followed by a blank line and then three hyphens.

Probably, as soon as we figure all this stuff out, the admins will install their promised upgrade and totally change all this stuff!

Hey—it worked! To make a line (or probably, the whole paragraph) bold, folllow it immediately with three hyphens on a new line, with NO blank line between.

Boldly yours for real this time,

Ol' Jas

This isn't technically a Connosr tip, but as a (close your eyes Americans) socialist I feel strongly that everyone should be on the same footing. Ok, maybe I'm closer to a (close 'em again) Communist in that I am happy to share my spirits with all who need them, but the point of this post is that everyone should be able to access things that they want in the same way.

I just learned, and maybe I'm late to the game, that you can ask your local LCBO store to order in something that is at a distant store. For example, there are loads of Amrut peated CS in Oakville or London but none available in Toronto.

All you have to do is call the store you want it to go to, and they will look up the product. They will get it from the location most convenient for them to keep costs lower. In this particular case, they may have some at the LCBO warehouse. But then they will arrange for transfer.

Cool....

I have just discovered that the review writing page is basically an HTML editor. Which means if you know a little bit of HTML you can format your copy as well as embed images in there.

For images I use a 582 x 313 px image which I first upload to a location (I use the media library of my blog) - then quite simply I link to it in my review.

It gives my reviews a nice touch.

@Nozinan It pays off to befriend the local LCBO manager...

I wrote a review yesterday and it seems that it doesn't appear in the list when I search.

I'm talking about my review of kilkerran wip 7. Searching for either "kilkerran" or "glengyle", my review isn't listed. I'm telling you this not so much because I want to push my review (ofcourse I'd be glad if you read it and commented if you wish) but as to put the spotlight on a potential problem.

I always research, here among other places, before I purchase and perhaps there are a bunch of knowledgeable reviews that would be of great help that never gets shown?!

I wrote a review yesterday and it seems that it doesn't appear in the list when I search.

I'm talking about my review of kilkerran wip 7. Searching for either "kilkerran" or "glengyle", my review isn't listed. I'm telling you this not so much because I want to push my review (ofcourse I'd be glad if you read it and commented if you wish) but as to put the spotlight on a potential problem.

I always research, here among other places, before I purchase and perhaps there are a bunch of knowledgeable reviews that would be of great help that never gets shown?!

I've been looking at older posts by manually scrolling from newer to older threads. What I should have been doing is typing in the search field for a Discussion of interest. A common issue when someone starts new thread topic, someone else, points out an old thread on the same thread on the topic already exist. ie. Glassware.

My advise is, before starting a new thread "Discussion", search to see if there is already a thread existing on the subject of interest. Information is cumulative and the more of it in one location the more helpful it is to everyone - less fragmentation.