brew manager development blog

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.

Starting to think about brew manager again. We had a brew at my house on Friday, 55 gallons of beer, with most of it ending up in my basement for fermenting. Chris has gotten me a logo and a preliminary layout. Both will get revised some more but it’s something to start coding a view to so that is exciting. I hope to get some work done this week and next, then its back to school at the end of August. This will probably take some time away from Brew Manager but not too much hopefully.