Hopville Blog

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

Continuing my second sweep through Hopville, lots of new stuff happened over the weekend:

• New “miscellaneous ingredients” section added to the recipe page to handle flavorings, clarifiers, etc.
• Recipe types have been added.  Search and style browsing both now include filtering by recipe type so you can find relevant recipes (all grain, extract, partial mash) more easily.
• Recipes can now be exported as BeerXML.
• Lots of little UI tweaks in pursuit of beery beauty.

Right now I’m trying to shoehorn the 2008 BJCP style guidelines into the database, and fleshing out new style pages that will make all the style information readily available on Hopville.

Current recipe count: 633

I’ve pretty much burnt out on fixing up my house, which has been my big summer project.  So now it’s back to working on stuff in my newly clean office space.  It’s stylin’.  I’m preparing a significant Hopville release right now, but it’s mostly significant in the guts of the program.  I’m converting the database to use metric units to store all recipe measurements.  This will make the site a lot more useful for non-U.S. folks.  It’s true that most users of the site are in the States, but that’s partly because the site is effectively useless for non-citizens.  We’re the only remaining stalwarts of the ancient English system.  Except maybe Burma.  And Liberia.  Not a lot of homebrewing going on in those locales.

But I’m not just converting to metric in order to feel wordly.  This change will also facilitate recipe importing and exporting features.  BeerXML is the language that brewing software uses to communicate with other brewing software about recipes, and it only speaks metric.

The metrics conversion shouldn’t affect U.S. users at all, the Beer Calculus interface and calculations will remain the same (assuming I didn’t mess up…but I’m being especially careful with this release), but users will be able to create, view, and edit recipes in whichever system they like.  Hopefully I’ll be rolling out that release by the end of the weekend, along with some navigation improvements.

Speaking of navigation improvements, I finally added search to Hopville this week.  It was a big, gaping hole in the site navigation so I’m glad some users contacted me to cow-prod me into adding it.

Current recipe count: 613