Archive for New Features

One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Site

March 27, 2008 at 1:41 pm · Filed under Beer Calculus, Hopville, New Features

The Hopville recipe count turned 100 today! Okay, it’s a relatively small milestone, but it’s also the very first milestone. And when you launch a site with three recipes on it, do no promotion/advertising/blog commenting, and have almost no Google exposure (which is still true…Google’s last crawl was on the 11th), 100 feels like a lot of recipes. Hey G, why don’tcha come on back and see us sometime? We’d like that. The more, the merrier. With 41 registered users, I think we might’ve already surpassed the population count of the real Hopville, OR.

In other news, recent developments on the site:

  • First draft of fleshed-out brewer profile pages. You can now add a profile picture, a link to your website, and a few words about your brewing self to the profile page. That page has been split into tabbed pages for Recent Activity, Recipes Created, Recipes Favorite-d, and Comments.
  • Editing individual ingredients in Beer Calculus is now AJAX-based, so each page load as the recipe gets designed and updated is a wee bit faster than it was before.
  • Completed the list of recipe types so all BJCP beer styles are represented.
  • Added a beer style dropdown to the style page, making it easy to switch between styles when browsing recipes. Search soon to follow.
  • As usual, lots of little design changes accompanied these updates.

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On the Road to 1.0

March 17, 2008 at 12:53 pm · Filed under Bug Fixes, New Features, News

I managed to avoid hangovers this weekend – at least, debilitating ones – and made more steady progress on Hopville. When I started thinking about releasing the site as fast and light-weight as possible, I reckoned there’d be three stages of the initial roll-out. With the addition of the recipe comments feature, I’m about half way done with the “second phase”. I suppose that means I’m about half way to a launch-ready site, and the current participants are unwittingly acting as Beta testers. Shhh…

New Stuff

  • Comments are now allowed on recipes, so brewers can share questions, compliments, and tips on their recipes
  • The points per gallon of sugar extract, as well as the lovibond rating of each fermentable ingredient, are now customizable.  Previously there were default settings for each ingredient, which were fixed and never displayed.  That was handy for keeping the interface clean, but continued design tweaks on the calculator are facilitating more customization options without huge costs in terms of clutter.
  • Added White Labs yeast strains, as well as Rice Hulls as a mash/sparge ingredient


Other Updates

  • Improved the way stylesheets handle the “printable” version of pages, so more information is displayed on the printed version, and a separate version no longer needs to be maintained
  • Fixed some bugs with “save” versus “save as” when updating saved recipes
  • Made the maximum weight per fermentable ingredient dynamic, dependent on batch size. Most people will never know this happened, but it’s much more convenient for folks brewing batches of 10+ gallons.

Current recipe count: 74

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