Something to see

Work progresses on the edit page albeit rather slowly. I have been spending much of my time and effort on another project recently. I will make an announcement shortly.

Anyway, there is now an edit button on the view page which will take you to the edit page. It's a bit rough and ready with many hidden fields visible and quite a lot missing. At least I've got it to the stage where I can make incremental improvements even when I don't have much time to work on it. I hope functionality will start coming on line in a few days. All that currently happens is the information required to populate the form is assembled and displayed.

You can also get to the edit page using the add links on the town page or the 'add new beer' button on a brewer view page.

Excuses, excuses

You may have noticed a distinct lack of progress on the new site. Well at the end of last month I headed off to the UK for 10 days. I had some family business to take care of in Scotland and on the way home visited the GBBF in London. I had the laptop with me but for various reasons managed about 10 minutes of work.

I'm now back in Amsterdam and the serious work on the edit page is underway. I'm working on populating the form first then once that's working will move on to the actual add/edit functionality.

more soon...

Getting there

Just a quick update. Login is fully functional and the login page is the first XHTML compliant page in the site. There's still no reason to login but all the rights management seems to be working and the first features that rely on it are being developed right now. I've also been doing more work on the view page. The presentation has been completely separated from the database access logic so it's now really simple to create alternative versions of this page.

I've also added application level control so I can make the site read only or turn it off completely if the need arises. That's about it for now. Keep adding stuff to the old site, information is always needed.

A quiet Friday...

Sorry about the quality of the bierpr0n, last week I'd had a couple of beers in town before getting home and this weekend I guess I just wasn't that thirsty. Friday night TV is currently pretty bad and we've got a lot on socially right now so it'll probably be a while before any real classics appear.

Black Boss porter from Poland, Christmas beer from Jenlain in France and a Vlo from here in Amsterdam were my choices. Mrs ED loves Flying Dog Doggie Style from near Denver and Rochefort 8.

Just remembering a great night drinking the 8 in a biker bar in Rochefort...

Getting my sleeves rolled up.

I want to start on the edit page soon. I'm not looking forward to it as its a seriously complex bit of scripting. I can't even start to improve the page till I have the PHP version fully functional.

Anyway, the consequences are that I really need to get to work on session handling and logins. This side of things would be easy were it not for the army of crawlers , robots and other web automatons that constantly bombard the site.

Since I have no wish to advertise viagra for third parties on my site I have no option but to take part in a ridiculous arms race. luckily I still have a few aces up my sleeve.

One of the parts of the old beer engine that works well is the multi layered rights management. I intend to keep this pretty much the way it is now but rewriting it all in PHP will take some time. While I'm working on this not much will change visibly but it's one of the foundations the site is built on.

If you have a beer engine account you are already able to log in to the new version but I wouldn't bother. Nothing that depends on accounts has been built yet.

I've hacked some very basic country / province tables together so you can navigate from the 'places' link to a town and on to entries. This part of the site is likely to change a lot so I won't be putting a lot of effort in at this stage.

Lastly, for this post, when I get fed up looking at PHP script I do a bit of work on the new XHTML templates for the site. It's my intention to make the entire site accessible using text readers and other specialist browsers. This makes things like a high contrast version or a more mobile friendly version a simple change of stylesheet away. I've never been that comfortable with CSS2 techniques. For a living I convert invoices to html (using XSLT) and since invoices are primarily tabular, tables are my stock in trade. I've recently been developing for companies with very strict accessibility requirements so I'm finally getting up to speed with this way of doing things. Any CSS2 hotshots out there want to 'Zen Garden' the beer engine?

Another Friday night...

Black Albert, Greif Annafestbier, Neder St.Anna-Festbier and a SNAB Maelstrom. The Westvletern 12 was my wife's.

Knocking the crucial pages into shape

Currently I'm replicating the old ASP site in PHP. Once the new site completely matches the current functionality of the old one I'll switch over the live site and then the real innovation can begin.

So far I've managed about 80% of the 'view' page and about 95% of the 'town' page, text and map versions on one page. Soon I hope to tackle the 'edit' page. These three pages are by far the most complex in the site so when they're complete I'll have broken the back of the job.

I have been adding a little extra information on the view page like created and updated datestamps but most of the new stuff will have to wait till the entire site is migrated.

you can see an example of the 'town' page here and click through to 'view' pages.

There's currently a bug on the map which means the last item in the list does not display the pop up info window correctly, that's the next task.

I'd really like to hear any comments on any aspect of the beer engine so please let me know what you think.

Introduction

This blog has been created as a companion to my website the beer engine. I've been working on this insane project for about 5 years now and truly wish I'd never started it. Unfortunately I still think the idea is a good one and the website has the potential to be the most useful web destination for anyone interested in finding the best beers the world has to offer.

The inspiration was an American website called PubCrawler. I made a number of trips to the US west coast in the 1980s & 90s when the craft brewing scene was expanding like mad. Being a beer lover I was always keen to find out what was new every time I emerged from San Francisco or Sacramento airport. PubCrawler was a very early example of a website built around user contributions. Anyone could add a new bar, brewpub or brewery or add a review to existing entries. It was (and still is) organised by state and city, an arrangement well suited to the USA. In 1996 my wife and I drove an old muscle car coast to coast and the folder full of PubCrawler printouts proved invaluable.

A few years later, having learned many of the skills required, I decided to have a go at doing the same thing for Europe. I also decided to take things much farther as I figured a large database of beers, brewers, beershops and bars could be used in many different ways. In addition I'm a great believer in making things as easy and intuitive as possible. I find sites like RateBeer and BeerAdvocate a bit, well, geeky. They also tend to have a very American viewpoint. Nothing wrong with that if you're American but there's a whole continent here awash with wonderful beer where the culture and traditions are manifold and often ancient.

So, one day I fired up my PC, created a new database and started experimenting. The second version was a complete rewrite based on what I learned and was published for a while back around 2003. Of course it was full of bugs and problems. The next rewrite is what you can see now. It was always my intention to get maps integrated into the site but for a while it just looked like too much work and expense. A conversation (over a beer) with my brother persuaded me to check out the then new Google Maps. The last work I did on this version was to integrate the maps.

I think I've now made all the big mistakes and learned from them so, once again, I'm rewriting the entire site. Just to keep me awake I'm also moving from ASP to PHP.

The new site is starting to take shape at http://phptest.beerengine.com/ and anyone is welcome to have a look round. It's a mess and will remain so for the next few months but all sorts of previously unseen goodies should start appearing soon.