Building the beer engine

Nothing to see here...

2011-02-08T21:30:00.003+01:00

But that doesn't mean nothing is happening. A whole new database structure is being built and tested. Sync tools are being built to feed the data from beerengine.com into the new DB. Template pages are being created with multilingual capabilities.

Not only is that happening but I'm currently building another single country site which will work in a similar way to the engine. It will concentrate on bars & shops and is hoped to be a source of information for a regular printed guide to the country in question. Although you will never know it when using the new site it will be using the beerengine database. Unlike the engine (so far) this site will be heavily publicised as soon as it's in good shape.

No, I'm not telling anyone which country! I really want to see this stand on it's own two feet.

If you think you know which site it is drop me a note and I'll send a bottle of something very special if you're the first to guess correctly.

Anyway, I think I'll go write some more sync scripts.

2011-01-26T00:41:00.002+01:00

Been thinking about the site again and I've decided to pretty much start again.

I can use the existing dataset so nothing will be wasted.

I was mulling over the new features I want to add and brainstorming a new indexing system. (developed about 8 years back to index tens of thousands of photos but gathering cobwebs since then. Shame since it's very simple and powerful.)

As I said earlier I've now started to view the site as a collection of datasets. I've come up with a way to easily index a disparate collection of datasets which should result in a very simple user experience. Still got to bench test it. Watch this space. Must go create a new database....

2011-01-21T01:31:00.002+01:00

Progress is close to glacial but things are actually happening. I've created a new domain mobile.beerengine.com and have been experimenting with optimising the site for mobile use. I got myself an iPhone last month so that's mostly what I've been using to develop the pages. A couple of friends have Blackberries and the site seems to work quite well on that platform. Haven't had a chance to look on an Android device yet but I'm sure someone I know uses one.

All the new stuff is being developed in PHP. I don't see any point in spending any more time on the old ASP site.

Just to keep things interesting I've also started work on a completely new section of the site. I've long wanted to add a dictionary / glossary / translation feature to the beerengine. It's not just a new feature but the start of a much more versatile indexing system for the whole site. It also provides the infrastructure for making the site multilingual. I might not have much time for writing code but long drives can be a good environment to mentaly test ideas and data structures. I now view the site as a collection of data sets rather than one big rambling set.

Hopefully some of this will be visible in a week or two.

2010-10-20T01:17:00.002+02:00

It's nearly two months since I announced that I was working on the beer engine again. There's nothing much to see but I have been making a little progress. I've got the bare bones of the map browser working. Getting the data back and forward turns out to be the easy bit. Collating the data and presenting it on the client is the fiddly bit. I once wrote some javascripts to sort, filter and display archived invoices (stored as XML on a CD) using only a browser. I wish I could remember exactly how I did it.

http://phptest.beerengine.com/map2.php kind of shows you what I'm up to but till I get some quality time to work on it things like map pointers and rollovers are just items on a wish list.

I've also dipped my toe in location based content for smartphones. I've got a page which will display a map of your current location on an iPhone. Big deal, Google Maps does it all the time. The difference is that my page has access to all the data in the beer engine and I know how to use it. The usual problem of lack of time is frustrating.

http://phptest.beerengine.com/wai3b.php if you really need to know where you are.

Strange coincidence or...

2010-09-01T00:48:00.005+02:00

A strange chain of events today revealed an interesting coincidence. I left a list of beers that I'd been entering in the compay database lying on our dining table. My wife noticed it and spotted the Toccalmato Skizoid. She made some comment about the spelling and I came up with the standard English spelling. She then commented that it's a word that's really only used by young people. Being a smart arse I pointed out that anyone into serious rock music would know King Crimson's seminal 1969 album In the Court of the Crimson King and the 1st track, 21st Century Schizoid Man. Somewhere in my head a lightbulb went on. A quick trip to Wikipedia produced the cover artwork of said LP.

Back to work

2010-08-25T20:10:00.002+02:00

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.

Something to see

2008-08-25T17:32:00.002+02:00

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

2008-08-18T12:28:00.003+02:00

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

2008-07-30T01:38:00.002+02:00

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...

2008-07-21T01:27:00.002+02:00

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.

2008-07-17T00:20:00.004+02:00

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...

2008-07-14T12:41:00.005+02:00

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

2008-07-14T11:17:00.005+02:00

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

2008-07-10T16:58:00.000+02:00

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.