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
