Countdown to Hopville 2.0

January 29, 2012 at 2:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

I’m asking users of Hopville to fill in a short (10 question) survey on the future of the site. If you haven’t filled in the survey yet, feel free to do so over here.

I created the survey mostly to get an idea how people might respond to Hopville changing over to the freemium model, where the site remains free up to a certain point, but then requires a paid membership (a la Flickr, Pandora, Dropbox, etc).  I’m working on the next major version of the site right now and plan to use the freemium business model to help usher Hopville into its next phase. What I’m currently calling the next phase is, “Holy crap, this website is really fun to work on and thousands of people rely on it so how ’bout I double down on it and turn it into something awesome.”  That’s too long of a phrase to type all the time so instead I’m using geek speak: Hopville 2.0.  Hopville 1.0 is the site you see now, the one that will get us to the milestone of one hundred thousand homebrew recipes.  Hopville 2.0 is the kind of site that will get us to a million.  Think about that: one million homebrew recipes.  I’m already building the renovated website, working toward a self-imposed deadline, and so far I’ve stayed on track.  If all goes as planned, the new site will launch by late Spring.  Here’s the logo, designed by one of my favorite rock poster artists, Frida Clements:

Hopville logo

I’ve gotten a significant amount of feedback from the survey, and the results confirmed a few of my basic assumptions:

  1. Lots of brewers would be willing to pay for Hopville’s services, as long as those services continue to be actively maintained and improved.
  2. Lots of other folks only use Hopville because it’s free.
  3. Lots of folks want a mobile/tablet app for Hopville ASAP.

Hopville 2.0 will cater to the #1 crowd, will mostly accommodate the #2 crowd (i.e. Beer Calculus and Hopville’s recipes will remain public and free), and will lay the foundation for #3 by establishing an API that a future Hopville app (or third-party apps that any enterprising software developers could build) could use to synchronize with Hopville’s data.

At launch, brewers who are already using Hopville at a “Pro” level of activity will be granted a free evaluation period of at least three months, even longer for long-time users of the site. I think most people who like the current site will love the new one, but as a crotchety old seasoned web developer, I know that a website can’t please all the people all the time.  For those who try out the new site and would rather not subscribe, I’ll continue to provide functionality to export all their recipe data as BeerXML – that way they can easily migrate their recipes over to their brewing software of choice.  For those who’ve already supported the site with voluntary donations – the finest people in the world – I’ll provide extended free evaluation periods that correspond to their level of donation.

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have, either here or directly via email.

Current recipe count: 87,890

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Another Winter in Hopville

May 23, 2011 at 2:10 pm · Filed under Beer Calculus, Bug Fixes, Hopville, New Features

I’d started the winter focused on building another juicy web app having no connection to Hopville. It was the kind of project that would make me rich and famous and handsome and smart.  As these things go, while I concentrated all of my time and energy elsewhere, Hopville sneakily enjoyed a significant growth spurt, approximately doubling in traffic in the trailing months of 2010. The site had been on auto-pilot for months, so I was surprised and inspired that it’s slow, steady march toward success suddenly sped up. I doubled back at the beginning of the year and started working on Hopville in my (still very limited) spare time.

The result is that, over the last few months I’ve gotten several days’ worth of work on Hopville done. Lots of small changes and new features have made it to the site, mostly unannounced.  While I plan to continue working on new features for the near future (because now I realize that Hopville is the site that will make me rich and famous and handsome and smart), I wanted to take this time to summarize the stuff that has already made it to the site in 2011:

  • Customizable yeast attenuation. Each strain will continue to have a default attenuation value, but brewers can adjust the attenuation percentage on their recipes in order to better match their own situation or experience.
  • Hopville now includes a feature allowing you to follow other brewers.  Now folks can easily keep tabs on each other’s brewing activity.
  • Malt additions can now be marked as Late Boil Additions. Ingredients marked in this way will not affect the calculated gravity of the boil, which means they also won’t affect IBU calculations in formulas sensitive to boil gravity. Many brewers who use extract in their beers requested this feature – late boil additions are a great way to maximize hop utilization when brewing with extracts.
  • Another common request was to allow for “each” units for miscellaneous ingredients so that, for instance, you don’t have to calculate or guess a specific weight or volume for something unit-based, like a Whirlfloc tablet.
  • Brewers who measure the color of their finished beer can now store their result as the measured SRM/EBC.
  • Added a page to highlight Brewing Statistics. What’s there now is a first draft – as time goes on I hope to find lots of interesting information to pull out of Hopville’s database and display here in fancy graphs and charts and things.
  • Added a “share” button to easily link any recipes to a post on one of several social media sites.
  • Created the official Facebook Page for Hopville.com.
  • Added a new category for recipes, Extract with Specialty Grains. Formerly all Extract recipes were sorted and filtered equally, whether or not the recipe included grains. Now folks looking for one type of extract recipe or the other can find them more easily.
  • Bug fixes improved sundry items: top navigation, large volume batches, recipe cloning, metrics mode, BeerXML syntax, recipe sorting, recipe “interestingness” score, direct heat mash rests, partial mash categorization, lovibond range…

Most importantly (in the grand scheme of things), now you can Support Hopville with a simple donation via PayPal. I’m hoping to create a positive feedback loop where Hopville’s fans provide significant enough financial support to keep me from getting distracted by other projects. By staying focused, the site’s improvements will come at a much faster rate, hopefully feeding back into increased financial support, meaning the site could become viable as a part-time job for me instead of the hobby site it is now.  Paying members are encouraged to participate directly in this feedback loop by voting for their favorite future features on another new part of the site, the “Future Features” page.

Current recipe count: 50,205

Comments (1)

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

Comments (12)

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