We've become a little addicted to enhancing the performance on our site, removing a heap of SQL calls and optimising various views. To that end we've cut down the amount of work that various pages have to do now, so they load up even snappier, and put less stain on our database and CPU's. Completely irrelevant for you all, but its good to know we care about it all, isnt it? :)

In terms of content - we've also added 5 new delicious cocktails to the site for you, as well as enhancing a couple of our lists. Nice work us (/me)!

We've spent the morning doing a good old code cleanup and performance review. We ran our code through a few different code quality tools, fixed some syntactical inconsistencies and upgraded some calls to the latest versions. We also formalised our code structure.

But also, more importantly for you, we've spent a long time optimising our code to remove a heap of N+1 problems, irrelevant queries we no longer need, added some new database indexes we noticed we were missing and just generally sped the whole site over a heap of different areas.

We undertook this as we prepare for a summer of new additions coming your way. Watch this space.

We've spent a bit of time recently tidying up our backend processes to be a little more streamlined, and a little less cumbersome. Obviously you wont really notice anything we've done (although we did make a tiny few UI adjustments in the front end) but the work we put in here just free's up time down the line for us to concentrate on other aspects.

However we have also updated a heap of images on our lists (which were all looking, frankly, a little horrible), and also wrote some scripts to auto recognise cocktails in out level up series, and adding our beautiful recipe cards into them if it finds any.

We've done a quick visual tidy up on our posts, level up and blog. We now show time to read, word counts, some sub heading and made the reading content area more pleasing to the eye; we've generally increased our visual appeal with some extra UI touches.

The should be a lot nicer to read now, and hopefully the extra meta gives you more info upfront.

See our Surprising Mocktail Recipes That Taste Like the Real Thing for an example.

We noticed an error in our email webhook calls which meant that failed email sends werent being logged, and deal with (i.e. unsubscribed) from our email lists. We _think_ we've caught this now, so any failed messages sent should automatically be removed from the email list. Fingers crossed.

To note this would not have effected unsubscribes, which were working perfectly!

We've been working behind the scenes to clean up our email lists, removing some malformed emails that slipped through the cracks before we tightened up the email validation. We've also fixed a couple of small bugs in the email subscription process here.

Along with this, we've added a new preferences where you can set if you'd like to receive site news from us. This won't be used often, just for big updates and the like, but separates this out from the recipe drop, ingredient deep dive or 3rd party promotional stuff.

All ground work for some big updates coming soon.

We've tightened up our email security to do proper checks on valid email addresses now, just to stop fake accounts being created, or from helping users who mistype during registration.

We've started a new wave of cleanups for our cocktail methods and ingredient lists. We noticed a few errors creeping into them all and have started to fix the errors. This is a long process over all 3000+ cocktails, so bear with us, but we're trying to prioritise the more popular ones first.

Sorry for the radio silence in the old Changelog recently, but its not due to us being quiet on the development front as we keep on pushing the boundaries and functionality of our app and website. A host of updates on the site including:

But along with that we've upgraded our infrastructure with much better backups now, a proper database scaling system, and a tweaked deployment.

Along with that we had a 2 day downtime about a month ago which meant all hands on deck as we worked hard to resolve that.

So as you can see, theres been a lot of groundwork behind the scenes that although you may not directly notice right now, it helps keep everything secure, working and efficient!

We updated our app to 2.91 a couple of days ago. Just some very small wording changes.

We also found a bit of time to firstly streamline our MyBar page on web, so that premium members dont get slowed down by a large mybar image. We have also cleaned up our categorisation of MyBar, adding Scotch, moving Allspice Dram to its correct parent, and combining the whisky categories. Should be a lot simpler and more inituitive now.

Oh and the usual new cocktails and new blog posts ahoy!