Beer Graphing Fun Time! May 13th, 2016

After finishing up the recent flurry of activity and taking a couple weeks off from serious site development, I decided to ease back into things with a "fun" feature addition: Consumption Graphing! Available via the Consumed area in anyone's cellar (see the new "View Graphs" button in the header), these charts are a preliminary pass at illustrating your consumption habits and history visually.

Click the above button in your Consumed area to display the charts below.

For now I'm featuring the two graphs above, Beers Consumed and Styles Covered. Graphs can be viewed on a per-year basis for every year you've been a member of the site, and graph values provide more information on hover. The Consumed graph charts your per-month bottle consumption for the specified year, while the Styles graph shows the styles represented by the bottles consumed in that year. In addition, some extra data is displayed alongside each graph, such as the total volume of beer consumed or your favorite style that year.

You'll also notice a new "Share" button on the Graphs page with an informative tooltip. As is also possible with the Cellar and Consumption History pages, all you need to do to share the new Graphs page is copy the URL and share it with whomever you'd like! As long as your cellar isn't marked as private, anyone can access this new area for any existing cellar.

I have some ideas for further graphing, e.g., total cellar size over time, brewery representation breakdown, and possibly some trade-related graphing, but I'm happy with this simple presentation for round one. If you notice any issues or have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know, as always. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this new way to view your consumption habits!

Minor Mobile Updates April 26th, 2016

A few mobile updates to increase parity with the desktop app, along with some other changes.

  • Added new account settings (Hide In Fridge, Enable Location Column) with appropriate messaging to mobile Account Settings page
  • Added account email and password change features to mobile version
  • Added Location display and management to mobile view/manage entry pages
  • On desktop, Bottle Date and Drink By fields are now masked with YYYY-MM-DD. Hyphens will now be automatically inserted as you type, and the fields will enforce proper formatting of inputted dates
  • Fixed styling for Recover Password page
  • Fixed bug around Messages and latest activity recording
And that's that! Still have a big mobile revamp and a new trading infrastructure planned, both of which I hope to launch in the next few months. Stay tuned.

Since giving users the ability to disable the In Fridge column in their cellars, I've been wondering about how to utilize the extra horizontal space that doing so opens up. To that end, I'm introducing customizable storage locations as a new, optional column.


I expect the vast majority of users will continue to use the normal In Cellar and In Fridge column setup, but for those who desire a more granular way to organize their beer, the new Location column should fit the bill. To use the new column, you must do the following:

  • Disable the In Fridge column in the My Account area (if you do so, please mind the prompts and understand that this will combine any existing In Fridge counts with their corresponding In Cellar counts)
  • Enable the Location column in the My Account area

Locations are user-definable and can be up to 20 characters long. You can create as many storage locations as you'd like, or edit existing location names, under the new Storage Location tab in the My Account area. You'll notice the My Account area has also received a bit of a makeover in order to accommodate the increasing number of account options.


Once enabled, and after creating some locations, you will be able to manage locations on existing beers using the inline management pane in your cellar. You'll also be able to specify a location when adding new beers to your cellar. As pictured above, you can effectively emulate the In Fridge column using this functionality, as well as specify any number of other custom locations depending on your cellaring situation.

The Location column is also supported via the Import process. It is optional, and I've added language to indicate that it will only be displayed if the proper account settings are in place. That said, even if you decide to hide the Location column after using it, you will never lose location assignments—they will simply not be visible. The same goes for importing location assignments, even if you're not displaying them.

This is a first pass at this feature, and I will likely enhance functionality in the future. As always, if you notice any issues or bugs, please let me know. Specifically, I made some changes around the cellar styling that should actually decrease loading time, but they might cause some display weirdness depending on your browser or resolution.

A final note: the Location field is not yet integrated into the mobile version of the site, but this will be forthcoming.  Cheers!

Small Batch Updates #2 April 17th, 2016

Another small round of updates, consisting of the following:

  • Minor layout changes to the Drink Beer inline form. These are preliminary, as I have some bigger changes planned for this space.
  • If you choose to hide the In Fridge column, the corresponding In Fridge fields when adding or managing beers are now properly hidden.
  • Lots of brewery and beer cleanup; in addition to user reports, I did a run through the entire collection of breweries, eliminated any duplicates I discovered, and merged beer records as needed.
  • Various typos and some small browser bugs have also been fixed.

Cheers!

Small Batch Updates April 12th, 2016

Work has continued on the site and I've been sprucing things up here and there. Some recent updates include:

  • Autocomplete results for Beers and Breweries now return up to 20 hits, and the results are scrollable
  • Minor Elasticsearch indexing changes to improve search result relevancy
  • When opening the Add to Cellar modal, the Brewery field is now automatically focused
  • When tabbing through the Add to Cellar modal, In Cellar and In Fridge values are selected when focused for easier replacement
  • After clicking on an Invalid entry during the Fix Import process, any invalid fields will be automatically highlighted in the Fix Entry modal
  • When attempting to submit an Import with unmatched entries, users are now prompted to confirm before the submission is finalized

In addition, community management reports have been rolling in and are usually fixed within a day. Thanks to your help, a number of big breweries with duplicate records have been consolidated along with a load of duplicate beers. Every report that comes in makes the database a little bit better for everyone, so I really appreciate anyone taking the time to report data issues or flesh out missing data on existing records.  Cheers!