We’re making a imperial stout today. Woo. We adapted this recipe by upping the two row and dropping the carafoam. We also changed the yeast to Scottish Ale. I’m really looking forward to this one. Full recipe and post details to come shortly.
Just a bit. I’m going to start blogging about brewing on here too. I’ve semi done it in the past, but officially I will start to blog about making beer, as well as making software for beer (not that I’m doing much of that at the moment). I’ve also started a new endeavor, bikefromscratch.com where I talk about bikes.
Work is continuing on brew manager, although not at the pace I’d like. I was not able to take the extra week off I had been hoping for, perhaps later in January. I have been able to get recipe creation in good enough shape that I think it can be used. This means I’ll probably launch it in some limited form in the next few weeks. I’ve been working on trying to get the look and feel to not suck. Thus far I’ve been unsuccessful on these fronts, but I’m reading more and working on it so we will see what comes of it. Designing things that look good turns out to be harder than I’d anticipated. I’ve been mucking with CSS positioning and really just trying to learn how to do things with CSS. I’m picking it up, but slowly for sure. Maybe its time to go buy a book.
Even if it looks terrible I’ll put something up so I don’t have to keep using google docs to store my recipes. Keeping them in documents isn’t working out for me. Not enough structure and I lack the self discipline to force myself to do it in a free form document.
I just finished up being able to add steps to a boil and remove them based off the ingredients in the recipe. I’m going to muck with how hops work one more time, and possibly how the database is seeded and then I should be ready to launch something. woo.
In other news I’ve been brewing quite a bit and started doing beer reviews for another blog, beerporn. Lately I’ve been trying to make quicker beers since most of what we have in the fermenters is long term (a lambic and two Flanders reds). We bottled a pale that turned out really well, just bottled a porter and have a breakfast stout in the primary that I’m really excited about. The breakfast stout should end up with a low ABV and taste a bit like maple syrup.
Total bullshit. I’ve have not even checked if brew manager runs on my development system after getting rails happy. I’m planning on taking a week off in December (several actually, but only one related to brew manager) and devote it to working full time on brew manager. Hopefully the ability to focus will be good for it and me. My wife will be working and the kid will be in day care. So I should have at least a week, possibly more to devote full time to brew manager.
I’ve started to poke around with iPhone development as well. One of the things I’ve realized is that we use iPhones a lot when we are brewing to lookup recipies, update / read our wiki etc. This will not be my main focus, especially considering the site doesn’t really work for anyone besides me yet. But I do think it will be a fun and interesting thing to work on in the future.
I’m headed out to Zurich on Saturday for our European Sales Engineering (I think that’s what SE means) rotation. I’ll be talking to them about the thing I do for my day job. So…. at least one more week brew manager will be on hiatus. But I’m at least at the point where I want to do it. Hopefully soon want will turn to need and time will allow.
I’ve been out of town again, and when I’m in town I’ve been distracted with a few things that have pushed brewmanager to the back burner again. Tonight I’m back in force and ready to get started on it again. The layout is still pretty ugly, but its serviceable to make sure I’ve got the back end working the way its supposed to. My current plan is to look into why things fail when we are running at dreamhost but they work when I’m running them on my laptop.
So… off to it then.
I got some time to work on things again tonight. I’ve been busy adding the navigation tabs and figuring out how that all works. I decided to use Tabnav because it seemed like the path of least resistance. So far I think that was a good choice. It took me about 20 min to get oriented and then I was off and running. Once again I’m impressed how easy it is to get a basic skeleton going for things in rails.
So far I’ve got the recipe page with tabs to a users inventory. After writing this I’ll work on getting the tabs fleshed out more, I’m still not sure what elements it makes sense to navigate to. I keep having this internal debate that tabs should take you to content and not actions. For instance it should take you to your recipes but we should not have a tab to start a new recipe. I think I might add tabs for recipes, inventory and brews, and possibly the BJCP guidelines (If I choose to reproduce them here, still up in the air on that too). Each of those tabs will have the list you would expect, as well as action links for deleting, editing and adding / starting a new whatever.
Its funny how little time this took, about an hour but how productive it feels because it changed the way the site looks. In my day job I don’t ever see a user interface change for the work I do…. instant gratification is nice.
One gotcha I don’t particularly understand about Tabnav. Whenever I update what a tab links to, or the text in the tab I have to restart mongrel… what the heck? Not a huge deal but I wasted about 15 min figuring out why my changes wouldn’t take effect.
Not much progress on the site as we’ve had a bunch going on with work lately. I’ll get back at it in earnest next week. In the mean time Ian and I bottled 10 gallons (Cherry Bourbon Stout and a Trippel) and racked another 25 or so to secondaries (Pumpkin Ale, Rasion Detra and a Red). All of them smelled decent, looking forward to drinking them.
Tonight I started playing with CSS to get the color scheme that Chris came up with onto a web page. No tabs or navigation or anything yet, but I’ve splashed the colors on the page. Kinda like that guy that used to paint on MTV. You can take a peek at what we have started to play with here. I’ve embellished the original scheme slightly and we will see if Chris beats me up for it. It’s easy enough to change back I suppose.
Be warned that that page is in no way functional. Anything posted under the pre alpha site is really just for Chris to take a peak and what I’m doing and is never guaranteed to work (I update things haphazardly and make no effort to ensure that it reflects a consistent image) and it isn’t really for public consumption. I probably should not have named it pre alpha….
Anyway I’ve learned that I don’t know much about CSS. This is not a terribley huge suprise. I am muddling my way through and making decent progress. If anyone’s got a good web page or book on CSS to recommend I’d appreciate it. I’ve read some stuff online and haven’t found any good comprehensive thing I’m supper happy with. I plan to go pickup a book this weekend maybe. Surley O’Reilly has something that can help me out.
Anyway, thats my quick update and now I’m back to it.
I’ve returned from the various vacations. Chris and I just got back from Kansas City for some baseball games. We had a good time, and talked about Brew Manager and our plans for it.
Tonight I plan to get reaquannted and figure out where I’ve left off and what I want to pickup next. I’ll start working on the navigation tabs and whatnot I beleive.
In other news I found a hop plant that I didn’t realize we had, good news and now I have to figure out what kind it is. Should be ready to harvest in the next month or so.
go brew some beer while I’m gone. Eventually i’ll have a tool to help you.
In the mean time, watch the watchmen teaser trailer. Make sure you’re sitting down and wearing pants you don’t care about.