Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

April 10, 2010 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Okay folks, Hopville and Beer Calculus are likely to be a little drunk and out of sorts this weekend.  Or maybe it’s me that will be drunk and out of sorts, and the site will be merely rough around the edges.  I decided to roll out the current state of the major revision I described a bit in my last post.  But this is definitely a case where I’m pushing it live in order to get more eyeballs on it and to light a fire under my butt to finish the parts that aren’t really ready for prime time.  Bear with me through a slew of changes, probably some times when the site is a little broken, and please report any bugs – I plan to focus all my (limited) spare time on Hopville this week, so bugs should get fixed pretty quickly…within a day or so.  The ingredient “info” links and ingredient search will be back on the site ASAP – just have to get them working properly with the new Beer Calculus code.

Current recipe count: 14,960

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The “February 25th Release” was very poorly named.

March 16, 2010 at 10:38 pm · Filed under Web/Technical

Well.  I made a personal deadline to roll out a new release of Hopville by February 25th, the site’s second birthday, but things have changed quite a bit since I was making any personal dealines.  First, I was unexpectedly asked to audition for a band.  I managed to pass, so now I’m practicing with and gigging with and learning dozens of new songs for a band…which is time-consuming.  Meanwhile, the job I started in February ended up having a pretty intensive, high-productivity work environment with long hours and very little wiggle room.  No complaints here – the new band and new job are great – but much of the free time I might’ve had over the last month and a half simply…vanished.

Thinks are calmer now as I settle into both new roles, and I continue to make progress on the site.  I’m now aiming to roll out the new stuff by the end of March. You can mark my words, or cross your fingers, or knock on wood – not really sure how to instruct you at this point.  But anyway…what is the new stuff?  I’ve boiled this release down to two major updates: better site navigation and improved Beer Calculus performance.

YOU SHOULD STOP READING NOW IF YOU’RE NOT A GEEK.

The performance improvements are what made this release a challenging one.  I rewrote all the front-end parts of Beer Calculus to make them easier to maintain and to improve the way the front-end communicates to the back-end.  Current users won’t be shocked by the changes, but their ongoing use of the site will be every-so-subtly more fun and rewarding.  Like buying a newer, noticeably-faster-at-first computer.  And on my end, the code is already cleaner and easier to manage, which means I hope to build new stuff at a faster pace than before.  I’m definitely looking forward to getting this release out the door – when a new launch (including lots of small UI improvements) is overdue by a whole month the existing site becomes quite an eyesore.

THIS IS YOUR SECOND WARNING, NON-NERD.  STOP READING!

Since this blog post announces that there is nothing new to see, I figured I’d use this opportunity to describe those behind-the-scenes changes that nobody will notice or want to hear about on launch day anyway.  Here’s what I’ve been working on:

  • All Beer Calculus HTML will be rendered via HAML templates instead of ERB.  Net effect? The HTML will be more structurally and semantically sound, making the pages easier for browsers to render, easier for search engines to crawl, and easier for humans (especially me) to read.
  • Beer Calculus code goes RESTful.  Net effect?  Lighter pages and simpler, more AJAX-centric page requests result in a zippier interface that’s more responsive and fun to use.  Ever notice the the scary message your browser sends you every time you try a page reload on Beer Calculus?  Yeah…that won’t happen anymore.
  • JavaScript moves to the jQuery framework.  I came late to the jQuery party but there’s no stopping me now.  Net effect? Smoother and more responsive effects – web interfaces getting closer and closer to behaving as well as desktop software, without having to resort to Flash.  I still thought I’d have to resort to Flash (meaning, rewrite the calculator all over again in ActionScript) as of about six months ago, so it’s big news that JavaScript has matured to this inflection point.  Lots of cooler interface stuff to follow.

Current recipe count: 13,687

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Mayor of Hopville back in the office.

January 28, 2010 at 11:38 am · Filed under Hopville, New Features

I recently got hired again after six months of (mostly voluntary) unemployment.  While I normally don’t muddy up the Hopville blog with details of my personal life, this is relevant purely because of how shockingly little I accomplished during all that time off.  I mean sure,  I traveled a lot. I worked on the house. I interviewed and interviewed and interviewed some more.  Did some volunteer work. And so on.  But I took a long overdue break from the tech industry, and from software development in general, for the entire time.

Luckily for Hopville, now that I am about to start work again, I’m learning lots of knew stuff and I’m completely energized about getting back into web development.  On a recent trip back east, I had some productive time on the plane – including my first-ever launch of website features from a chair in the sky (since my Delta flights were equipped with WiFi).  Here’s what’s new:

  • Recipe pages now have dedicated sections where the brewer can add tasting notes and taste ratings.
  • Brewers pitching multiple yeasts in a single batch can now list unlimited yeast strains and bacteria cultures on a recipe page.  Previously only one yeast was allowed, so brewers pitching multiple cultures had to list the supplemental strains in the recipe comments.  Now the extra cultures become a part of the main recipe.
  • Measured OG and FG can be recorded on recipe pages – when present, the display of the measured values takes priority over the values estimates by Beer Calculus.
  • Brewers can easily export their entire Hopville recipe catalog as BeerXML from their recipe page.  This is a nice shortcut for folks who want to backup or export their entire list of recipes at once, rather than one at a time from each recipe page.
  • New and slightly more enticing homepage…though it’s still a work in progress, design-wise.  Much improved version launching in a few weeks.
  • Featured recipes! Recipes are now given an “interestingness” score which allows Hopville to feature lists of the juiciest recipes on the site.  Now that there are over 10,000 recipes on Hopville, this kind of highlighting will become an important signal-vs-noise aid, making it convenient to find the best recipes quickly.

Over the next month I’ll be continuing to do some major upgrades in preparation for a larger rollout of changes I’m planning to launch on February 25th.  It’s nice to be having fun with code again…and Hopville stands to reap the benefits.

Current recipe count: 11,134

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