Recent updates to Ever Wonder Wine, newest first.
The Posts admin page already let you filter by title, category, and year. It now also has a Status filter, so you can narrow the list down to just Published, just Draft, or just Scheduled posts — and combine it with the other filters, like seeing only Draft posts in a particular category or year.
That banner could appear even right after you'd genuinely clicked Update, because the background safety-net save sometimes lands a second after your real save and gets mistaken for something newer. It now only appears when the background copy is both truly newer (more than a minute, not a few seconds) and actually different from what you saved — and it now says plainly that your live post is unaffected either way, with a "What's different?" link showing exactly which fields changed.
Behind the scenes only. Your fix that keeps drafts out of search and the change that makes long pages fully searchable were built on the same day and touched the same code. As first written, the two would have undone each other. They now work together, and we tested them on a copy of the search index before going live. From now on, Claude will pull the latest changes at the start of every session, so work that's already in progress is visible before anything new is built.
The search service only accepts about 8,000 characters per page, so on 32 of your longer pages (United States, the Glossary, California AVAs, the Italy regions and more) everything past that point couldn't be found. Long pages are now handed to search one section at a time, using the headings you already have, so all of it can be found again. A search result also takes the reader straight to the matching section: searching "Finger Lakes" opens United States right at New York. You don't need to add or change any headings. Pages without headings are split up automatically.
After yesterday's fix that lets search jump straight to the right section of a long page, two pages — United States and Listing of Wines — had their own older "jump to" shortcut menus that were quietly renaming each section right after the page loaded. That meant a search result would open the right page but land at the top instead of the matching section. Both shortcut menus now leave the addresses alone, so search and the shortcut menus work off the same landing spots.
Behind the scenes only. Every time the site is updated, it now records which version went up, when, and who sent it. Visit /version.json on either site to see it, with a link to that exact change on GitHub. If the update included work that hadn't been saved to GitHub yet (normal when testing on staging), it says so.
A search for "Finger Lakes" turned up an unfinished, still-in-progress New York page that was never meant to be visible yet. The cause: the tool that bulk-loads content into the site doesn't talk to the search service the way the normal edit screen does, so when a page's draft/published status changed that way, search was never told to remove it. A cleanup pass found 52 pages in this stuck state and removed them, the bulk-load tool now keeps search in sync going forward, and search itself now double-checks a page is actually published before ever showing it, as a backstop.
Behind the scenes only, nothing on the site changes. Claude Code keeps a small personal settings file in your website folder. Git now knows to leave it alone, so it can never be sent up to GitHub by accident, while the shared settings that make Claude ask before touching the live site stay in place for everyone.
When people read your posts in a feed reader, or in the Mailchimp email that goes out each morning, the post's main photo was missing, along with the wine name and price on reviews. Once the site switches over, that email starts pulling from the new site, so each post now shows up there just as it does on the site: photo first, then the wine and price, then the article. Separately, 15 links inside your posts and pages still pointed at your old Squarespace address and would have stopped working once Squarespace is cancelled. They now point at the right pages on the new site, including one in "The Top Two Most Prominent Acids in Wine" that had already been broken on Squarespace for a while.
Readers can now reach you from a new Contact page (linked at the bottom of every page), using the same four boxes as your Squarespace contact form. Wineries get a form of their own on the Submit Samples page, below your text, which now matches the latest wording from Squarespace. Every message is saved and listed under Messages in the admin, with a button to reply by email. Once email sending is switched on, each message will also land in your EverWonderWine@gmail.com inbox. There's quiet protection against spam robots, so you shouldn't see junk.
Squarespace builds each post's web address from the day you started writing it, but the new site uses the day it was published, so most old links (from Google, Facebook, old newsletters, other blogs) didn't match. We checked all 1,928 addresses Squarespace lists and taught the new site to send each one to the right place: old posts, tags, categories, the yearly review pages, the blog archive pages, and the old feed address that feed readers use. The only exceptions are 45 tags that were deleted in the cleanup; those few show the "page not found" page. The latest Squarespace posts (Riviera, Tempranillo, and Paton-Clemente, which goes live on the 21st) were also copied over.
On about 400 older Behind the Cork reviews, the wine name and price were sitting in the first line of the article. They're now filled in as the review's wine name and price, which display at the top of the post, and the repeated line was removed. This was done back in August; this just files away the tool that did it.
Claude's notes leaned hard on "be careful with the live site," which risked making it hesitate over a typo. Now, once you've shown Claude the sentence you want changed, it just changes it — on Staging or on the live site — and tells you which one it saved to. Bigger moves (publishing, deleting a post, changing a publish date, anything you didn't point at) still get a check with you first. One note: until your web address is switched over from Squarespace, a change saved to Production won't show up at everwonderwine.com yet, and Claude will say so rather than let you go looking.
Claude already had to stop and ask you before connecting to the Production server, but that safety check only recognized the server by its numeric address. Once everwonderwine.com points at the new server, connecting by name would have skipped the check entirely. It now recognizes every way of naming Production, so you'll always get the confirmation prompt first. Staging is untouched — that still runs without interruption.
The step-by-step guides for importing your Squarespace content and for the newsletter still pointed at the old practice server we retired in August. Following them would have made changes on a machine with out-of-date content, which tends to make perfectly good work look broken. Both guides now point at the current Staging server.
Your guides used to call the private copy of the site "the practice site" and the real one "the live site." They now use the same two names you'll hear from Claude and from Michael: Staging (staging.everwonderwine.com) is where you test, play, and figure things out, and Production (everwonderwine.com) is the real site your readers see. The rhythm is unchanged — try it on Staging, and when you're happy, push it to Production — but from now on Claude will always name which of the two it's about to touch.
The notes and how-to guides that come with the site (the terminal setup walkthrough, the import and newsletter instructions, and the notes Claude reads before it helps you) had their sentences chopped into short lines, which made them awkward to read and edit. They're now written as normal flowing paragraphs that wrap to fit whatever window you're reading them in. The wording is unchanged, and nothing about the website itself is affected.
The tool Michael uses to push site updates to the server showed a harmless error message on Mac computers. Fixed — no change to the site itself.
Behind the scenes, the files that make up the public website now live in their own clearly-marked folder, separate from Michael's development notes and tools. Nothing about the site itself changes — it just makes accidents (like a private working file ending up on the public site) structurally impossible.
The tool that copies your post photos over from Squarespace stopped working on Michael's computer after a recent behind-the-scenes reorganization. It's fixed, and all 31 photos from your newest posts came across successfully.
The preview site now lives at staging.everwonderwine.com, on a brand-new, faster server — the same kind of machine the real site will run on when it goes live. The old practice address (eww.mekstudios.com) still works for now, but staging.everwonderwine.com is the one to use.
When the transfer tool copies your content over, posts you've queued up to publish on a future date used to arrive as plain drafts — the publish date was lost, and each one would have needed rescheduling by hand. Now they come across as scheduled posts that will go live on their own, at the same day and time you picked on Squarespace.
The transfer tool was filing "A Tour of Wine Grapes" posts under the retired "Tour of Grapes" name, an empty bucket nobody would think to look in. They now land in your Grape Varieties category with the rest of the series.
The site is moving to a new server that runs the latest version of PHP (the language the site is built in). A full check of all the site's code found just two tiny outdated spots, now updated. Nothing changes in how the site looks or works — it's simply ready for its new home.
General was a catch-all left over from before categories got their own names. It's gone now — new posts default to Behind the Cork™ Reviews instead, since that's the one written most often.
Four old posts (Inaugural Post, 2015 Year in Review, Happy Holidays!, Happy New Year!) that never fit any topic now live in their own "Site News" category instead of the catch-all "General" one.
It used to be buried at the bottom of the Wine 101 dropdown. It now shows up on its own in the main menu, between Behind the Cork Reviews and About.
Tags in the sidebar used to show as a wall of buttons. They now read as a plain list of links, matching the look of the Categories and Archives lists next to them, so the sidebar feels calmer.
A varietal is the wine made from a single grape; a variety is the grape itself — this category is about the grapes, so "Varieties" is the more accurate name.
Makes it clearer to new visitors that this category is your wine reviews.
Clicking a category on the Blog page used to show every single post at once — 501 in a row for Behind the Cork. Category pages now work like the site's existing year/month archives: a manageable list at a time, with a "browse by year" picker up top and a "browse by month" picker once you're inside a year.
Styles is now Wine Styles, Regions is Wine Regions, Tasting is Wine Tasting, Serving is Serving Wine, Pairing is Food & Wine Pairing, and Wineries & Tastings is Winery Guides. Just the names shown to visitors changed — nothing else moved.
Posts without a hand-written summary were showing raw codes like "’" instead of an apostrophe in their preview text on the blog, category, tag, and archive pages. Found on the General category page; the same fix applies everywhere this could show up.
The old catch-all "General" category has been split into ten focused ones — Winemaking, Styles, Regions, Grape Varietals, Tasting, Serving, Choosing a Wine, Wineries & Tastings, Pairing, and Wine Storage. Every post that used to sit in General now has one of these, and you can pick any of them the next time you write or edit a post.
Removed a large piece of old machinery that double-checked post text for unsafe code before showing it. Since you're the only one writing posts, it was doing busywork on every page for no benefit. Nothing changes in how you write or how the site looks — pages just have a little less work to do.
Every public page of the site now quietly reports visits to Fathom, a privacy-friendly analytics service — no cookies, no tracking people around the web. You'll be able to see which posts and pages people are actually reading. The admin screens you use to write and edit are not tracked.
Pick a future date and time in the Publish Date box and the green button changes to "Schedule." The post stays hidden from the site until that moment, then goes live on its own — no need to be at the computer. Scheduled posts show a yellow "Scheduled" badge on the Posts screen, and a "Publish Now" button if you change your mind and want it up right away.
The site can now combine two tags into one and automatically forward anyone using the old tag's link to the new one instead of showing an error. This is the groundwork for the tag cleanup you've been reviewing — nothing on the site changes yet.
The number of posts next to each tag now links straight to that tag's page on the site, so you can see exactly which posts have it without typing a web address.
The Tags screen now lets you label any tag as a Varietal, Region, or Style (and pick a parent for Regions, like Napa Valley under California). New tags you label show up in the browse box at the bottom of /reviews right away — no more waiting on a code change.
If a Post or Page changes elsewhere while you have it open for editing, saving no longer silently overwrites the newer version. Instead, your edits are safely kept as a draft you can restore, and the screen shows you what's actually live.
The Bold, Italic, Link, headings, list, divider, and image-upload buttons that appear when editing a Post or Page body now also appear above the Intro Text box on the Blog Page screen.
Same as editing a Post or Page: an Edit tab for typing, and a Preview tab that shows exactly how the text will look above the post list on /blog, styled the same as the live site.
The admin screen for editing the /blog page's title, subtitle, and intro text is now labeled "Blog Page" in the menu and on the screen itself.
The "Filter by title" box on the admin Posts page was taking up half the row, pushing the category buttons and Year dropdown onto a second line at normal window widths. It's narrower now so everything fits on one line.
Next to the category buttons (Behind the Cork, Ever Wonder, etc.) on the admin Posts page, there's now a Year dropdown — pick a year to see only posts from then, and it works together with the category buttons and the title search box.
Next to the "Pages" heading in admin, two buttons let you switch between viewing only your published pages or only your drafts, instead of scrolling through everything mixed together.
A few pages (About, Glossary, Behind the Cork™ Reviews) were sinking to the bottom of the Pages list in admin instead of sorting with the rest. The list is now purely A-to-Z, so any page can be found by name. This doesn't affect the order of items in the site's live navigation menu.
The text at the top of /blog (above the post list) used to only be changeable by editing code. There's now a "Blog Settings" screen in the admin menu with Title, Subtitle, and Intro Text boxes you can edit yourself, anytime. The wording that was there before carried over automatically, so nothing changed on the live page.
The short tagline under a page's title (like "From grape to glass, made simple." on Wine 101) used to only be changeable by editing code. It's now a real "Subtitle" box in the page editor, right below Title — add, change, or remove it on any page yourself. Existing subtitles carried over automatically, nothing changed on the live pages.
Pages like /wine-101 and country pages show a short tagline under the title. That was missing from Preview — it now shows up there too, matching the live page.
A few pages with custom layouts — Wine 101's photo grid, Italy's region layout, the wine listing, and others — used to show incorrectly in Preview (e.g. Wine 101's three-across photo grid collapsed into a single column). Preview now matches the live page for these too.
The Preview tab in both editors used to show only your formatted paragraphs. It now also shows the title and featured image (with its caption, on posts) exactly as they'll appear on the live page — including how the paragraphs wrap beside the image and drop below it, the same as Squarespace's preview used to show.
A small wording tweak on the page and post editors.
In the page and post editors, clicking "Img" used to insert placeholder text that needed a picture's web address typed in by hand — with no easy way to get one. Now it opens a file picker, uploads the picture you choose, and drops it into the text automatically.
The post editor (used for blog articles like Behind the Cork) now shows a "Last edited" date, and its delete button moved next to Publish/Draft instead of sitting in its own separate box — matching the page editor.
In both the page and post editors, the button that inserts a divider line across the page used to be labeled "HR" (short for the technical term "horizontal rule"). It's now labeled "Line," which is clearer for what it actually does.
"Delete this page" now sits right below the Publish/Draft buttons instead of its own separate "Danger zone" box. It still asks you to confirm before anything is deleted.
When editing a page, you'll now see "Last edited" with the date and time, right under the page's web address.
The bottom of every page now correctly shows "EverWonderWine" as one word, matching your branding, instead of the spaced-out "Ever Wonder Wine."
Every morning at 9, the site checks whether anything new was published the day before. If so, everyone on the subscriber list gets a nicely formatted email with the full post — picture, caption, and the whole article, looking just like it does on the site — the same job Mailchimp was doing, but built in. Readers sign up with the form at the bottom of any page and confirm from their inbox, and every email has a working unsubscribe link. There's also a new "Subscribers" page in the admin menu where you can see everyone on the list, add someone yourself, and check what's been sent. Addresses that bounce or mark an email as spam are taken off automatically so your emails keep landing in inboxes.
Typing an address like /wine-101/ with an extra slash at the end now lands on the proper /wine-101 — one true address per page, which search engines prefer.
Your reference pages are now organized into a real family tree, and their web addresses show it: Red Wines, for example, now lives at /wine-101/types-of-wine/red-wines instead of just /red-wines. The Wine 101 home page also got a cleaner address — /wine-101 instead of /wine-101-1. Every old address still works: anyone following an old link or bookmark is sent straight to the page's new home, and the same is true if you ever move a page to a different spot later. The little breadcrumb trail at the top of each page now follows this tree automatically, so new pages get the right trail without any extra setup. In the admin, each page has a "Parent Page" picker that controls where it sits, and both editors now show the page's full web address as a link you can click to see the finished page.
Any page that shows a stack of posts — the blog, the year and month archives, tag pages, and the Behind the Cork™ review lists — used to download every thumbnail picture the instant the page opened, including the ones far down the page a reader may never scroll to. Now each picture is fetched only as the reader gets close to it. The top of the page appears sooner, and readers on phones use less data. The very first picture still loads right away, so there's never an empty gap where the top image should be.
Until now, re-importing the Squarespace site would have overwritten everything here with the Squarespace copy — including all the link, wording, and formatting fixes you've made on this site. The import now works the other way around: brand-new posts you've written on Squarespace come straight in, and anything that exists in both places but differs is set aside in a new "Import Review" list in the admin menu. For each one you see exactly what's different, side by side, and choose which version wins — nothing changes and nothing is deleted until you say so. Your decisions are remembered, so the next import only asks about things Squarespace has actually changed since. There's also a one-click "keep this site's version for all" for the first big pass.
Tuscany's sub-regions on the Italy page are now organized the same way Piedmont's are: a numbered list of its 12 main areas, with Brunello di Montalcino, Chianti, and Val di Cornia each showing their own smaller zones as bullets tucked underneath. Click to expand and see all of them, or collapse it back down to keep the page tidy.
When you write a post or page, you format it by typing a few small symbols — two stars around a word makes it bold, a hyphen at the start of a line makes a bullet. That shorthand is called Markdown, and until now there was nothing to look it up in. There's now a "Formatting Help" page in the admin menu, and a link to it just above the writing box, that explains every symbol with a side-by-side example: what you type on the left, what your readers will see on the right. Those examples are generated by the website itself, so they're always exactly right. It also warns about the handful of things other Markdown guides on the internet show that don't work here — tables especially, since a pasted table looks nearly correct while you're typing and then falls apart on the finished page.
When editing a blog post, you could drag an image onto a box to attach it, or click to pick a file, and you'd see a thumbnail of it before saving. Editing a page only offered a plain "Choose File" button with no preview. Both screens now work the same way, so there's nothing different to remember depending on where you are.
Searching used to look only through blog posts. It now also covers all the wine guide pages — countries and regions, types of wine, grape listings, the glossary, and more. Results are ordered so the reference pages and grape deep-dives show up before individual wine reviews that merely mention the word, matched words are highlighted, and close-enough spellings still find what you meant ("reisling" finds Riesling). The search box also remembers what you typed and shows results on their own page.
A couple of behind-the-scenes files (a database export and a helper script) had quietly ended up at public web addresses. Those are now blocked, and the tool that copies the site to the server stops and asks before sending anything that isn't part of the site — so this can't happen again.
Removed the word "ongoing" from the mention of the Tour of Wine Grapes series on the /blog page, since the wording no longer fit.
The paragraph on the /blog page explaining the two kinds of posts (Behind the Cork reviews and everything else) is now a bulleted list, making it easier to scan at a glance.
Browsing a specific month (like /blog/2024/06) now shows that month's posts in the order they were written, oldest to newest, instead of newest-first.
On the Edit Post page, the Featured Image box now lets you drag an image file straight in from your desktop or a folder, instead of only clicking Choose File.
Claude's project notes were pointing at "staging.everwonderwine.com," an address that doesn't actually go to the practice site anymore — it was showing the old pre-move site instead, which made some finished work look broken. The notes now correctly point to eww.mekstudios.com. Claude can also now read and write the practice database directly and safely, using Marc's own login, instead of getting stuck looking for locked-away passwords.
On the Find a Wine pages (like Cabernet Sauvignon reviews), clicking page 2, 3, and so on was always showing page 1 — that's fixed. Those pages also now list reviews strictly newest-first. The yearly blog archives (like /blog/2024) now have page numbers too, so you can browse the whole year instead of just the six most recent posts.
The homepage's "Explore the Site" section now has its own card for the Ever Wonder? series, alongside Wine 101, Behind the Cork, and Blog, so that big collection of Q&A posts is easier for visitors to find.
Nudged the new Glossary of Wine Terms link in the Wine 101 dropdown menu so it sits in the same order as the tiles on the Wine 101 page (right before Wine Fun Facts).
The Wine 101 dropdown menu at the top of the site was missing a link to the Glossary of Wine Terms page, even though it was already featured on the Wine 101 page itself. It's now in the menu too.
The Glossary, Wine Fun Facts, and Listing of Common Wines tiles on the Wine 101 page now show your new "title card" style images. Also fixed a display bug where these picture tiles could crop off part of the image on some screen sizes — they now always show the full picture.
The Wine Regions of the World page now has a crisp, full-width world map at the top. The United States page also has a full-width US map above the A–Z letter bar. The letter bar was improved so W jumps to Washington State (not West Virginia), state names are fully visible after jumping (no longer hidden behind the bar), and an invisible character hiding before the Texas heading was removed.
The /united-states page now has a sticky A–Z letter bar at the top so you can jump directly to any state. Stray asterisks that were appearing as literal text (a leftover from the Squarespace migration) were also cleaned up across the United States, California, Oregon, Washington State, and Italy pages. The Glossary terms are now bold, the Submit Samples page heading and formatting were updated, and the /glossary-of-terms page received a formatting fix.
The Red Wines page now uses sub-headings instead of bullet points for Full Bodied, Medium Bodied, Light Bodied, Red Wine Blends, and Meritage — making the page easier to scan. A 'Read More' link was added to the Red Wine Blends section. Intro text was added under the Meritage heading. All the blog post links on the page were also corrected — several dates were pointing to the wrong day.
The Red Wines and White Wines pages each now have two new sub-pages — one organized by grape type and one by region — with clickable links right on the main page to take you there. Breadcrumb trails (Home › Wine 101 › Types of Wine › …) now appear at the top of all the wine-type pages and their sub-pages so you can always find your way back. The Rosé Wines page was rewritten to combine its original text with the full description from the original site. On the Sparkling Wines page, all the links to related blog posts were fixed — they were pointing to the wrong dates and going nowhere.
When you find a wine by browsing (say, clicking "Barbera" in the Find a Wine table), a "← Back to Barbera Reviews" link now appears at the bottom of the post so you can easily return to the list. It only shows up when you navigate there from the reviews page — it won't appear if you go to the post directly.
The Types of Wine page got a full makeover: a new featured photo at the top (four wine glasses on a barrel), a clickable table of contents so you can jump straight to any wine type, 'Back to top' links between sections, and photos added to the Red Wines, White Wines, Rosé Wines, Sparkling Wines, Dessert Wines, Fortified Wines, and Distilled Wines & Spirits sections — each with proper photo credits. Links throughout the page now appear in blue with underlines, and the page title was moved above the photo.
Brought the site up to date with your most recent Squarespace export: newly added posts and pages are now live, and anything you'd changed in Squarespace now matches here too. If a page or post's web address changed, the old link automatically forwards to the new one, so existing links and bookmarks keep working. A few leftover duplicate pages from the original move were also tidied up.
Whether a page shows up in the site's top menu is now a single "Show in main navigation" checkbox in the page editor, replacing the older parent/child page setup. The menu itself looks the same as before.
You can now delete a post or page. Each row in the Posts and Pages lists has a Delete button — clicking it asks you to confirm with "Yes, delete" before anything happens — and there's a matching Delete option at the bottom of each editor's right column. Deleting a page that has sub-pages keeps those sub-pages (they simply move up to the top level), and you'll get a heads-up before you confirm.
The post and page editors now show a colored badge telling you at a glance whether you're looking at a Draft or something that's Published, with clear "Publish", "Update", and "Save Draft" buttons. Brand-new pages now start as drafts, and you can preview a draft as a real page while you're logged in. And when you set a post's web address, the editor checks that it isn't already used by another post on the same day.
Fixed a glitch where, just after saving a brand-new page, starting another new page would mistakenly offer to bring back the one you'd already saved. Also tidied the wording of the autosave "saved to your browser" message.
The Glossary page now has an A–Z bar at the top — click a letter to jump straight to that section. Letters with no entries are greyed out.
Added this very page — a running, plain-English list of recent site updates, linked from the footer, so you can see what's changed at a glance.
While you're working on a post or page, your draft is now saved automatically so you won't lose it. And when you edit something that's already published, your changes stay private until you choose to publish them — nothing goes live by accident.
In the admin area, the Posts list now has a search box that filters your posts by title instantly as you type.
The Pages list in the admin area got the same instant title search, so you can find a page quickly.