Welcome to Beer Suggest

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy, fruitful, healthy, and productive new year! I have a lot of exciting things planned for the new year, so stay tuned! Don't forget to check out the new forums.

As of this moment the Beer Suggest forums have launched. I'll be rolling out more enhancements to the forum early in 2009, but for now they should have everything you need. Every thread has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, or you can choose to subscribe via email. There are a couple of good discussions going on right now, so get in there and join in!

In the little free time I've had during this busy end of the year, I've decided this week I'll be releasing the forums. I wanted to get more features implemented but they will come in due time. When the forums are released they will have all of the basic features, and as time goes on I'll be incrementally adding new features. There is a lot of fun stuff to talk about during the holidays and this season in general, when it comes to beer. I don't have an exact date, but it will be released later this week. The next post will be the "Welcome to the forums" announcement.

Stay tuned!

It's a brand new month so it's time for some updates on the forums. I've been extremely busy at work, so I didn't get as far as planned. That being said, the basic functionality is there. You can add new threads, make posts, subscribe to new forums, and check out the latest posts. I want to get a few statistics implemented, for example being able to view all of your posts, or a friends, and possibly integrating the forum posts into the friend feed on your profile page. In lieu of the actual forums I have a screenshot to hold you over just a little bit longer. Click on the image for a full size image.

I'll have more time to work on the few remaining features in the next week or two.

I've put a lot of work in this past weekend on the website. I'm currently working on a forum. Forums are a great way of building a better community and are something Beer Suggest would greatly benefit from. I don't have an exact time estimate, but it is safe to say that the forums will most likely be launching within the next month. As more work gets done I'll post some screenshots to give you a preview of what to expect. Stay tuned for more updates in the near future!

I've been working on a few small changes the past couple of days. There are some visual changes like cleaner looking tabs on the beer and brewery details pages, as well as a few other things on various pages. In addition to the visual changes I've also added the ability to comment on breweries. Now along with the Details and News tab there will also be a Comments tab for each brewery as shown in the image to the left.

Commenting on breweries will provide extra information about the brewery not found in the general description. This will allow users to express their experience with the brewery and spread it to others.

I'm launching Beer/Brewery News today in a Beta state. Everything should be in working order, but if not let me know. Beer News will let you read the latest news about brews from various areas. The actual Beer News page will list all of the news, with the latest first. Each news entry will give you it's source and will open up on the web page of the source if you choose to read the entire article. There will also be a link at the bottom of each news entry inviting you to read more news from this brewery.

Each brewery page will have it's own news tab which will list all news related to that particular brewery. This way if you just want to read about one brewery you can do so. In addition there will be an option on each brewery page to subscribe to an RSS feed for that brewery. There is also a global brewery news RSS feed which will list all news.

All registered users also have an additional option. Each user can subscribe to news for any number of breweries on the website. There will be a new tab in your profile named "News". This tab will have all news for all of the breweries you are subscribed to. So if you wanted to keep up to date with a couple local breweries without having to read every news article this is another way to read only the news that you are interested in. This subscribe option will be located on every brewery page and at the bottom of each article in the global beer news. There is also a link to unsubscribe if you no longer want a particular brewery's news to show up in your personal news feed.

I've had some time recently to mess around with an implementation for beer and brewery news. I've been making great progress, so I though I'd share a screenshot and some more information on how it will work.

For starters each brewery page will now have 4 tabs across the top. The Details tab will be the default one and will include the information you are already familiar with, brewery info and map. The next tab will be News. Clicking on this tab will give you all news related to the brewery sorted by the most recent first. You will see the title, the date published, where the news is coming from, and a brief blurb about the news entry. Clicking on the title or the read more link will open up a new window or tab directly on the site where the news came from. The 10 most recent news articles will be shown with a link at the bottom right to view older entries if they exist.

The next tab is a small one with an RSS icon(For those who are unfamiliar with RSS, read this link). Clicking on this tab will subscribe you to the RSS feed containing news about the brewery whose page you are on. Each brewery will have their own separate RSS feed. There will also be a global RSS feed that contains news about every brewery that is on Beer Suggest. The last tab is to add the brewery to your personal news list. After clicking on this tab this brewery's news will show up in a new section in your profile, so you can keep up to date with news on your favorite breweries without using an RSS feed.

I'm pretty excited about these features, and I think it will greatly improve the website. I'll elaborate a little bit more about these features, as well as update the FAQ when they are released. When should you look forward to these new features? I don't really have a good ETA, since it depends on the amount of time I have available, but a good guess would be sometime in the next 2-3 weeks.