Avoiding Burning Out A Blowfish

Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 12 Comments

Jonathan writes in to ask:

I was hoping for some advice. I have a very high grade pipe from a very well known carver. It is a blowfish shape and one of the walls was cut very very thin. The carver has offered to replace the pipe at no additional cost to me but I am hoping to avoid this since I am in love with this pipe already. My question to you is what would you advise I smoke that will burn well to avoid many relights and also has a tendancy to smoke cool? I am not a huge VaPer guy but am open to almost anything besides a straight Vir.

What help can we offer him?

Brief Update

Posted on April 26, 2008
Filed Under Site News | 2 Comments

John Lennon said “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”, and he was oh so very right. Life has happened here folks, and all my plans have come to a screeching halt for a little bit.

As some of you know, I am living in south Georgia at the moment in order to help out my extended family with some projects. Two weeks ago, one of those projects became my number one priority, and since then I have been working ten hour days to rewire a 100+ year old house.

In addition to the rewiring work, it is time for our garden to go in, and with around a dozen people eating off of it, it is quite sizable, so all of the time I am not wiring is going into that project.

Fear not however. Tobacco Reviews is still up and running, and though I am slow and late with the requests, they are getting done. As soon as I have some breathing room again I will get back to the process of moving the site to the new code base, a process which was about 85% done when I had to stop.

Thanks for reading here, keeping the site going, and offering your encouragement over the years. You make it all worthwhile.

Pipe & Tobacco Trades, Swaps and Auctions

Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 11 Comments

I have been a bit out of the loop for a while and I was wondering, what are the venues people use these days to trade or sell estate pipes and aged tins? Is it mostly through dealers and eBay, or is there somewhere I don’t know about?

How do you swap, buy and sell your estates and aged tins?

Comments Are Now Threaded

Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under Site News | Leave a Comment

Just a quick note to let everyone know that every comment on every article now has a “reply to this comment” link. If you click that link, the comment you leave will be nicely nested under the comment you are replying to. That should help us keep our discussions straight!

More On Tagging Blends

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Technical | 10 Comments

My previous post on better searching and discovery of blends has generated a good discussion on the possibility of tagging. I thought it deserved its own thread here, so I am moving the discussion of tagging over to this post so we can keep it on its own.

Now, to respond to the comments so far. As a bit of background, this is an aspect of Information Science that I have a keen interest in, so I think a small primer is in order:

What we are talking about here is metadata: data about our data. There are two possibilities for organizing or generating metadata; Controlled Taxonomies (or Vocabularies) and what are now called “folksonomies”, previously known as free-tagging.

Controlled Taxonomies are, without a doubt, the most accurate and useful types of classification schemes for metadata. A different way to look at them is that Controlled Taxonomies are Prescriptive Vocabularies and folksonomies are Emergent Vocabularies. Each have their place in indexing information, and the discussion at hand is which is more relevant to our needs here at Tobacco Reviews.

I love well-designed metadata and Controlled Taxonomies. I labored in love over the ones that are already here on the site, and the even-better ones on the new version of the site, but I do not believe that they are always appropriate. If I thought that it was even remotely possible to create such a vocabulary for “Blend Styles”, I would be the first to jump in and start work on it. I do not, however, think it possible.

There are too many permutations of styles of Blends extent right now for one person (me) to get a handle on them without stopping all other work completely for a couple of years. There is a serious lack of information and definition about Blends that would have to be overcome before any serious attempt to classify them could be made (what constitutes a “casing” or “topping” or “flavoring”, do we have reliable information on constituent tobaccos in a blend, etc…).

Without this sort of information, or at least good approximations, we cannot create a Controlled Taxonomy. We could pretend to by sanctioning a certain set of terms to be used for tagging Blends, but that wouldn’t really help at all - it would just lend us an air of authority without anything backing it up. If that is to be the case, I would prefer a simple free-tagging system, perhaps with some sort of “garbage collection” system that automatically dropped old unused terms after a while, so that the useful (gaged by actual use) would rise to the top and the rest would sink out of sight.

However, if there is the will amongst users to work on developing a serious Taxonomy of tobacco blends for the site; one that we can show to the world and defend the reasoning behind, I am all for it! I will provide as much help and support as I can for such a project and will be an enthusiastic participant. I will also, when such a project produced results, apply them to Tobacco Reviews and rigorously enforce its usage for all new Blends added to the site.

How we would go about creating such a thing is a matter for much discussion. First, let’s see if anyone is interested in the project and then maybe figure out how to do it. Any takers?

p.s. — I use “we” above not in the royal sense to refer to myself, but to mean us, all the people using Tobacco Reviews and deciding its future direction.

More Blend Discovery Ideas

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Features | 5 Comments

User Tobold writes:

There’s been any number of times that I wish I could . . .

a.      Bring up a list of blends that I would have flagged in the past as being of interest to me.  Then, I would click on the blend and go to the review page of that blend.

b.      Bring up a list of reviewers that I would have flagged in the past as being of interest to me.  Then, I would click on that reviewer to see the list of reviews he has posted.  At _that_ list, I could then click to see the specific review.

(I _do_ like the idea in the recent “Classifying Blends” that someone had of being able to call up individual reviews rather than have to wade thru the whole list when you are searching for an individual post.)

Obviously, if you wanted to use either feature “a” or “b”, you’d have to be a registered user of the site.

My question is:  Would anyone else use such features if they were available?

I’d love to here your thoughts on this idea. The ability to makes blends “Favorites” would dovetail nicely with the idea of “Following” certain reviewers. Should we add that to the development plan?

Duty Free Smoking?

Posted on April 2, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 6 Comments

Philip writes:

Do non-Uk pipesmokers realise that some blends of tobacco bought at UK duty free shops are not the original blend that would be bought in UK tobacconists? Examples are St. Bruno and Gold Block.

This assertion is news to me. Perhaps Philip, or someone else, would care to fill us in a bit further. Specifically, I would like to know:

Better Searching & Blend Discovery

Posted on April 2, 2008
Filed Under Features | 5 Comments

The responses to the Classifying Blends post have been very enlightening. It seems that the overwhelming sentiment is that instituting some sort of classification scheme for tobaccos would only be useful if it was helpful in finding new tobaccos to try out. There also seems to be wide agreement that there is too much disagreement about definitions to achieve that goal, as well as too many blends that defy classification.

The best thing to come out of the comments, as far as I can tell, is the obvious wish for more and better ways to search for or otherwise discover new tobaccos to try. Several good suggestions cropped up, and I have been mulling them over and thinking about a way to provide these better ways to find tobaccos. Here is what I have come up with as possible additions that, if they were added, would make things easier for everyone:

If you have any thoughts on these ideas, or on other ways to improve finding and sorting the tobacco blends, please post a comment and let me know.

Classifying Blends

Posted on March 30, 2008
Filed Under Site News | 25 Comments

I get a good number of emails like this one:

I was just thinking that it would be rather handy if one could browse tobaccos by “Blend Type”, as well. For example, “Oriental,” “Scottish,” “English,” “aromatic,” “Virginia,” etc.

I have so far not broached the subject too directly, but perhaps now, with all the work being done on the site, is the time to do so.

Everyone can agree, I think, that Blends fall roughly into two categories: English and Aromatic. Each of those may have sub-categories (Scottish, Balkan, etc.) which are the focus of quite a bit of debate.

Would it be helpful to sort the blends on the site this way, and how would you break them up?

Status Report

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under Site News | 4 Comments

Things are moving along here. I am doing quite a bit better job of keeping up with new account requests, additions and edits to the database, and answering/posting emailed questions. I know everyone appreciates that, as who wants to feel as if their email has disappeared into a black hole?

On the development front, I am making (slow) progress on moving everything over to the new code. The codebase itself is complete, and all that remains is the database work and the prettying up of things.

As far as the database migration, quite a bit is actually done; all of the ’support’ tables (e.g. Countries, Types, Cuts, Constituent Tobaccos) are moved over and working well. The  Brands are also moved, as well as the newly separate Manufacturers table, and the Users table is almost completely moved, though I have not yet extensively tested it yet.

That leaves the Blends table and the Reviews table to move. The Reviews table cannot move until it has both Blends and Users to match up to in the new db, so it is waiting for the Blends to be finished.

I have been working on getting the Blends table moved for what seems like an eternity. It was in this table that I made so many of the bad design decisions I have talked about. Undoing them without simply scrapping tons of content in it (e.g. the Blenders) has been painstaking to the point of being forensic.

I have found a way to preserve the Blenders for each Blend in every case in which that field actually refers to a human being instead of a company, and will be able to port them directly.

*** Database Geekiness Follows ***

The current bad design decision I am wrestling with is the relationship between the Blend and the contents of that blend (the constituent tobaccos). I made a poor decision to store that information in the database as a string instead of a relationship and rely on the scripting language to handle parsing that string and retrieving the actual contents. Oops. Now that I have seen the error of my ways, I have to correct that oversight in the Source database in order to be able to import the relationships properly.

This is proving to not be an easy feat for me, so if there is anyone reading with a working knowledge of Visual Basic (or a slightly advanced knowledge of SQL) I would love to have someone answer some questions about it. Otherwise I will continue doing as I have done; learning as I go.

I’m off to wrestle with the beast. I just thought you’d like to know how things were progressing.

keep looking »