What's new on wsky1

The big amber word in the headline on the home and /valuation pages ("whisky") was painted with a gradient-clip effect that some browsers, high-contrast modes and session recordings just don't render — so it could show up as a blank gap. It now falls back to solid amber everywhere, with the shimmer kept as a nice-to-have where it's supported.

Fresh reading in the blog: The Dalmore as a collectable, GlenDronach as a collectable, and a look at whether Japanese whisky is worth collecting in 2026.

A real session recording caught our own homepage rendering blank — the headline, subcopy and buttons were in the page but stranded invisible whenever the fade-in animation didn't run. The hero copy and calls-to-action are now visible by default, with the fade treated as a nice-to-have on top. If you ever landed on an empty-looking home page, that's fixed.

The engraved-plate sketch on a bottle's price page is drawn on demand, which meant that on a cache miss it could sit as a grey box for a few seconds and read as broken. It now shows an on-brand bottle silhouette while it renders, and starts loading eagerly since it's the first thing you see — so the page looks intentional the whole way through.

Credibility is the product, so a run of small inconsistencies got squashed. A valuation search row and the bottle's own page now count auction lots on exactly the same basis (no more off-by-a-few). Your portfolio's per-bottle estimates now sum to the header total. And the market-report movers no longer show implausible four-digit gainers built from a single thin early sale.

Fresh reading in the blog: Bowmore as a collectable, how to sell whisky at auction in 2026, and a plain-English breakdown of whisky cask investment scams. There's also a new step-by-step how-to for the free single-bottle valuation tool in the docs.

Importing a collection is no longer a leap of faith. The review step now shows, row by row, exactly which catalogue bottle we matched you to — with an alternative-edition picker when we're not sure we got the right one. Pasting a list understands comma- and tab-separated columns the same way a CSV does, and confirming an import gives you immediate feedback instead of a redirect that races the save.

A /prices headline was calling the latest sale a "median" — it now says what it means. Price cells round sensibly by size, so a £12,480 hammer and a £48 dram don't get the same false precision. Valuation search rows count the real number of lots behind a figure, and your portfolio's header P&L and 12-month chart are now labelled as the distinct metrics they are.

The auction photo on a bottle's price page is now clickable — tap it for a full zoom lightbox. The engraved-plate sketches got a rendering pass too (v12), clearing up speckled slabs and washed-out plates, and duplicated vintage years no longer sneak into catalogue bottle titles.

New bottles and pages now ping Bing the moment they change via IndexNow, so they're indexed in near real-time rather than whenever a crawler wanders by. The /valuation cluster carries HowTo structured data and tighter internal links, and we shut down a duplicate copy of the whole site that was serving on www — everything now redirects to the one canonical home.

Every bottle page now carries a hand-drawn, engraved-plate sketch rendered from the real lot photo — so you can confirm at a glance that the page in front of you is your bottle, not a near-namesake. It sits in a new two-column hero alongside the price, trend and tracking controls. Where no photo was captured, we search the auction house for one and only use it if it's an exact match.

A new block on every bottle page reads the last twelve months of real lots: how many sold, how often it comes up, which houses it trades at, and where it ranks against every bottle we track. A lot of trading reads as liquidity ("easy to find and to sell"); very little reads as rarity ("a good find when it appears"). Same data, honest framing either way.

Bottles now have a lifecycle. Mark one sealed, opened or sold, and a sale shows your realised gain or loss against what you paid. Populating a cellar got faster too: paste a list or drop a CSV — price paid and date bought included — and import the lot in one pass instead of one bottle at a time.

Credibility is the whole product, so a good chunk of the work went into the prices themselves. Multi-bottle auction lots no longer masquerade as a single bottle, mixed-variant outliers are clipped out of a bottle's history, and tripled auction titles are collapsed back to one. The lines on the page are quieter and more accurate.