Back to work

The more astute among you will have noticed that its almost exactly 2 years since I made an entry in this blog. I do have an excuse, honest.

Around the middle of August 2008 I was faced with a life changing decision. Do I continue working in web development or do I get involved in the beer business by taking over a small, specialist beer distributor. You've probably guessed that I bought the company.

One consequence is that I have very little time for anything other than work. Aside from the day to day running of the company I've been writing a lot of software to help me run things more efficiently. As the systems I've built are getting more complex I've noticed that I can't concentrate enough on an average evening to get much useful work done. I still need to hone my PHP skills so I'm going back to work on The Beer Engine. Oooh, look. I've given it capitals! Don't think I've done that before.

Although the beer engine has been static for the last couple of years the dataset has been growing steadily. This gives me a great base to work from. I've been working on a few refinements and improvements to the database which I'll try and implement in the new version. I hope that I can demonstrate all sorts of new ways to use the information that's been gathered over the last 5 years.

The first thing I want to work on is the map browser. I intend to use AJAX techniques to collate information held that is relevant to the map area in view. If that meant nothing here's an example. As you zoom in on a town, anything there with an entry in the beer engine will be listed and pinpointed on the map. The zoom level will determine the level of detail displayed.

As the bare bones of the site are built I intend to skew the presentation toward making Bars and Beershops more important than Brewers and Beers. The existing site gives equal weight to everything. I've always believed that the most useful function of the site would be to get real people to real beer. If you want to talk about beer on the internet there are plenty of places to do that. If you want to find places that sell great beer, use the beer engine (I hope...) I have all sorts of future uses for the beer information.

If you have any ideas about how to make the site easier to use or new features to add please let me know.