Welcome to Beer Suggest

Today I've released two new enhancements for the user profile. The first one is the revamped friends tab which I've talked about in some detail. Basically everything friend related(requests, feed, recently online, etc.) are combined under the "Friends" tab.

The second new item is in the Messages tab. You now have the ability to compose messages directly from here. Before, you needed to visit your friend's profile and click on a link in order to message them. Now you can choose your friend from a dropdown menu and compose the message.

Enjoy the new enhancements, and let me know what you like/don't like.

Since chances are I won't have an update ready this week I decided to show you what I have been working on. In order to make room for some future new tabs in the the user profile area, I'm merging the Requests tab into the Friends tab. I'm also adding some new features to the friends tab to make a more social environment. The look is similar to the messages tab. The navigation on the left from top to bottom reads: Friend Activity, Pending Requests, View Friends, Online Now, and Online Recently.

The major new feature here is the friend activity. This will be populated with what your friends have been up to on Beer Suggest lately. Anytime you review a beer, rate a beer, add a beer, edit a beer, favorite a beer, etc it will show up in the friend activity page for all of your friends. So if your friend rates a new beer over the weekend, you can see it right away on your friends tab in your profile. This page will become the default page you are directed to when you login.

The next two items you have seen before. These are just your pending friend requests, and a list of all of your friends. The last two are new as well. The Online Now link will show you all of your friends that are currently logged into Beer Suggest. As you can imagine the Online Recently link will show you friends that have logged in recently.

These updates will be coming in about a week to a week and a half. You can view a large screenshot of the new section by clicking on the picture above.

I've got some more site updates for everyone. I haven't had much time lately to work on new features, but I was able to get a few done. There are three main new features with this latest release. The first one is user RSS feeds. Now each user has 4 RSS feeds of their own. These feeds include: your top 10 beers, your lastet ratings, your latest reviews and the latest beer you have tried. You can put these feeds on your blog/website in order to share your beer data with others. Check out the FAQ for more information about this.

The second major update is that you can now filter your beer reccomendations. The filter options are by star rating and beer style, so if you only want to see which IPA's are reccomended to you, you can do that.

The third major item is Beer Suggest Mobile. You can now access a mobile friendly version of this website. It's limited to searching for beers/breweries, viewing their details, viewing their comments, viewing their ratings, and viewing their reviews. There is also a section which lists the top 20 beers. So if you are in a store trying to find something you might want to take home, you can whip out your phone and look up a good beer. The mobile section I am going to classify as beta, and am looking for suggestions on what other features should be included in it. So if you have an idea, comment, or other feedback make sure to let me know You can access the mobile version at http://beersuggest.com/mobile/.

There are a few other small changes which include:

• Ratings are no longer rounded off to the nearest 1/2 or whole so that they are more accurate in the beer stats.
• When reviewing a beer you can now choose 1/2 points, because sometimes an attribute of a beer isn't quite a 4, but is better than a 3.

I'd still appreciate as much feedback as you can dish out. Within the next week or two I'll be determining what the next new features are and will let you know then. Enjoy the new features!

Beer Suggest was successfully updated this morning. So what's new?

• You will notice small visual changes on the beer details page that help make the height of the pages more compact.
• On the home page you will also see the number of ratings and reviews.
• The beer stats have been given an update so that they are more accurate based upon both the ratings and the number of ratings.
• In the beer stats there is a new category which is worst rated beers.
• When you click on the "X users tried this beer" link on the beer details page it will list the rating that each user gave that particular beer.
• The advanced search for beers and breweries now each have their own pages.
• Lots of overall stability fixes.

So what's next for Beer Suggest? A mobile version of the website is currently in the works. This will allow mobile devices easier access to the main parts of the site like the search and beer details pages. I am also going through my enhancement list in order to choose two or three other items to work. I'll make sure to keep you updated on the status of these updates, and still would appreciate any feedback that you may have.

On Monday June 9th, 2008 Beer Suggest will be updated. I have been working on improving several areas of the site based off of recommendations from users. One of the changes is a pretty big change to the back-end which will require me to take down Beer Suggest for approximately 1 hour (8am - 9am EDT). It will probably only take a half an hour, but just to be safe I'm going to pad it to an hour. I'll have more information on what exactly has been updated/added on Monday.

After these updates I will begin adding new features to the website from my very long list. Again more information about that will be disclosed on Monday. I will also post a reminder on all pages of the site about the 1 hour downtime during updates.