Dustin said

Easy Way To Look Up Tasting Notes?

There have been many times I have tried to look up a tasting note for a particular tea for reference on if I liked it and how I steeped it. I end up either looking up the tea and going through pages of reviews to find mine or going through my reviews (which are also multiple pages) to find the particular tea. There has to be an easier way. I remember someone here once saying that you can put your username into the URL bar at the end of a tea to find your review, but was never able to get that to work for me and forget the particulars on how to do it. How do you all find your tasting notes?

22 Replies
Rui A. said

Not sure if it works for you but if I select the ‘You’ button and from the ‘Tealog’ I get my reviews.

Dustin said

I get that too, but I don’t see an easy way to find a particular tea from there other than go through multiple pages of my reviews until I find the tea I’m looking for.

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Zennenn said

Try googling the name of the tea, steepster, review notes, Dustin. Does that work? I often google steepster tea info rather than use the steepster search tool.

Dustin said

It does work in a wonky, but better than my other options way! Thanks! It gets a little weird when there are multiple notes I have made for one tea and I’m trying to find a particular one. Sure beats going through multiple pages of reviews!

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Yeah, the more notes you have, the more of a problem this is. I, too, have largely resorted to googling to find my own prior notes. I’m pretty sure I’ve whined about this in the what do you want to see in terms of upgrades thread at least once, but it really ought to be easier to find things on the site than it is. I would love to see a search box for my own tea notes so I can pull one up just by name rather than having to scroll through pages and pages of notes to find what I’m looking for.

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Best bet was to google it. But the main reason I started a personal spreadsheet was to track my stash and personal notes.

Steepster’s organization of your own stash and notes and lack of search tool is severely lacking. You are also at the mercy of the site, I had teas I reviewed disappear, so I lost notes to those. There’s also a month of reviews I did that are missing when I searched them as they were posted with my blog (guessing due to the outage awhile ago or stuff got consolidated). When there are times Steepster was down I couldn’t access anything either. With the last update (that was awhile ago) it’s more of a review site and it’s not a personal daily log as it used to be. It’s just better to move all a spreadsheet/etc and track yourself.

I use google sheets, that way I can get at my tea information on mobile (which is another problem with Steepster, still no mobile verison!). You can also use something like Evernote too.

Dustin said

I have used google sheets before, but never got the hang of it and didn’t know there were multiple templates! It looks like the travel planner template might be a good one. Do you use the blank sheet or a particular template? The idea of copying my nearly 700 notes seems a little overwhelming, yet I don’t like the idea of starting from scratch either! Oh the strange musings of a tea addict!

I used a blank template and made my own, that was the quick part. I started all over from the beginning back in 2015, taking a month to enter in every tea and whatever I could pull from steepster, that’s when I noticed even more things missing. Yeah, and I put in 500 teas, that’s the harder part! http://oolongowl.com/oolong-owl-tea-stash-count-march-2015-update/

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OMGsrsly said

I have a spreadsheet, but don’t track my reviews. If I’m having problems looking for something, I check my rss feed.

steepster.com/username/feed.rss

Dustin said

Wow, the rss feed has EVERYTHING!!! That might be the easiest way to copy notes to a spreadsheet! Thanks!

Dexter said

This is awesome I did not know this existed. Then browser search will pull up anything. THANK YOU!!!

Dustin said

I just copied my rss feed into a google doc sheet so I have it there to work with. I’d be crushed if years worth of notes went missing if something happened to this site!

OMGsrsly said

:D Its generally how I search my teas. Definitely got to start backing it up though.

LuckyMe said

Thank you! Was dreading having to copy and paste all of my notes into Evernote or a spreadsheet. This makes life much easier!

This is amazing! And, as a result of checking my RSS feed, I found out that I joined Steepster 2 years ago TODAY!

Dustin said

Happy Steepster Birthday, Christina!

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LuckyMe said

Steepster’s search function has been lacking for a long time. A mobile app to enter and find tasting notes would be awesome. I’m using Evernote and Google Keep for that now but it would be a more natural to have it as an extension of Steepster. I feel this site could be so much more than it is with just a few enhancements. Does anyone know if Steepster is still actively developed?

Uniquity said

Not really. The last upgrade was a year or so ago (?) and kind of problematic, some of it had to be undone. I’ve been around for about 5 years and though there have been changes, it’s not been a whole lot for the user, other than the overhaul of the flavours on each tea. That seemed to be tied in to the attempt to make Steepster profitable though, and I think since there is no money in Steepster there won’t be many upgrades. You never know though!

Dustin said

It looks like google keep takes notes from what you say to it. How easy is it to look up teas and keep a good log?

It is too bad that Steepster isn’t more developed. I do love the clean look and feel of it, but I’d be fine with seeing advertisements or paying a small subscription to see it get more attention development wise.

LuckyMe said

Google Keep is good for jotting down quick notes. And I find the voice to text very useful too. But it’s no-frills and simple.

I would say Evernote is much more robust. It has the edge in terms of editing, tagging, and organizing a large collection of tea notes.

Now that I’ve downloaded my RSS feed from Steepster, I plan to import everything into Evernote. I’ll continue to use Google Keep though for rough note taking.

OMGsrsly said

That’s a good idea, using Evernote. For me that’s over 2000 notes, though! :D Oh well, I’m sure I can manage that when I’m busy procrastinating on other things.

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AJ said

It used to be that you could go to Tea Log and then click “Logged _ Times” to go to your group of reviews for that tea. It’s still reflected in the URL you get when you mouse over it, but it’s just a remnant left over from before the update. The new setup of review-pages doesn’t honour it, and you just end up on the landing page for the tea.

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