brew manager development blog

I’ve gotten bugzilla installed. For the most part painless. The guys at dreamhost were nice enough to install a module for me. I tried myself but the cpan wrapper script, and just straight up make were getting killed. I think it was the memory/cpu cop. If anyone wants to install bugzilla at dreamhost the directions found on the dreamhost wiki are spot on. I’ve written a script that takes care of modifying the files they talk about and changing the permissions. If anyone wants it I’m happy to hand it over. I figure it makes upgrading less of a pain.

I’ve gotten the site to the point where a user can log in, and create recipes, search what recipes belong to them as well as everyone else. What a recipe is needs to get a little more fleshed out (adding fields). Due to family running around and merriment ( everyone should go to an Indian / Moroccan wedding at least once, way fun) I didn’t get as far as I’d have liked. Once I get the recipe fleshed out a bit I’ll post it to alpha.brewmanger.com (there will be an announcement when this happens, few days yet I suspect as work will be busy this week) and folks can start playing with it. At that point the site will be useful for storing recipes, but not much else.

After the recipe stuff is up I’ll tackle inventory as that seems to be the next logical step, and then the can I make this / what can I make with what I have functionality.

I’ve also had a friend volunteer to help with site design and the visual stuff. I’m pretty pumped because that isn’t my strong suit. The hope is that he can more or less draw me a picture and I can make it look like that. We will see how that goes depending on how his avaliablity is. The first thing I put up won’t have much beyond basic navigation and total page refreshes, substance over style

I took this afternoon off work because its slow. Thats a nice change fwiw. I got a chance to get much of the stuff needed setup on dreamhost. I’m using Google Apps for email, that was super easy to setup. Good for those guys. Once again Google pretty much proves they are the bees knees when it comes to these things.

I got the boiler plate webpage up that says “hey I’m going to build something”. I hope to have recipe creation up by the end of the weekend. I’m going with the release early and often approach I think.

In more exciting news, for me at least. I got subversion up and running on a host outside my house. So now it runs on dreamhost. Hopefully I’ll get bugzilla installed and I can stop making notes to my self via google docs.

So far I’m liking dream host a lot. I’ll put up some intelligent and organized thoughts about why I switched over from godaddy hosting later.

I’ve got the blog moved from the old site to the new. It involved all of clicking export and then import, but still I fell proud of myself.

I registered a new domain tonight, and I guess we will change the name of this thing. It will be brewmanager.com now (DNS probably hasn’t propagated yet). If you know what I do for my day job it’s kind of a fun name. I also changed the hosting to dream host (but haven’t’ moved anything over yet). They seem to have a better deal for more or less the same money.

I’ll move this blog over and send out an upudate via RSS when it stops working. For the nearish future everything will still live at beersessions.com and the blog will redirect to the right place.

Turns out a few guys in Santa Cruz own brewsession.com. It appears that they are making something similar, if not the same. Good for them. I’ll still create my deal but will end up changing the name when I think of something that isn’t just the plural of something someone else owns.

Tonight I started to lay out the object model I’ve had kicking around in my head. I generated a lot (if not all) of the scaffolding (models, views and controllers for the non rails crowd). I should probably lay down a real model so I have a design to code to, instead of relying on myself remembering it all. Anyone have any good suggestions for a UML modeling tool? At work we use Borland’s Together Architect but thats a more coin than I’m willing to shell out.

I’ve connected the user and the inventory object… I think for now I’ll leave it at that until I can get a model drawn up somewhere. Paper and pen maybe… lofi.

Much to my dismay I’m going to need some sort of login system. Not because I want to keep anyones credit card, address or even name. I don’t want to know about any of that, and I doubt  there will be a place to enter such information. It irritates me when sites make me login to view regular old content, or do one time things that don’t really require me to have an identity (comments on blogs for example). Epically when I don’t have to pay for it. As an aside, if I haven’t said it before Brew Sessions won’t cost anyone anything. If the bandwidth bill passes 10 bucks a month I’ll add ad words or something maybe… meh cross that bridge when I come to it

Anyway.. for as much as I can manage the site will be login free. My working idea is you will only need a login to use the inventory management, and if you want to save a brew session (there will be some sort of save as feature that exports it to a pdf or html too). Other than that the site will hopefully be login (and thus a slight irritation free).

Tonight I decided to start futzing with the authentication systems available for rails. I’m doing this first because it’s the part I’m least interested in… and in thoery if I get it over quickly I can move onto bigger and better things. After wading through documentation that appears to be out of date (this seems to be the status quo for most things rails) I settled on Acts as Authenticated.
I picked it for two reasons, the documentation appears to be reasonably accurate, and it looked easy. So far so good. I’ve got the mvc for it all generated and it looks like it does what it is supposed to do. I’m able to create an account.

So cheers to the Acts as Authenticated folks for making something I didn’t want to spend any time on a relatively quick and painless task. All in all it took about an hour.

This will be the development blog for Brew Manager. Eventually it will do all the stuff it says it does on the front page. For now I’ve gotten hosting setup and the domain name registered. I’m pretty sure I got a rails app created on godaddy.com. We will see how that works out as the internets don’t have great things to say about people success rate.

Like I said above, its going to be a rails site. I started playing with Ruby about a year ago. I took a rails seminar at school (I’m working on my masters) and thought “eh, what the heck”. It will run of mysql and whatever webserver godaddy puts in front of it. If someone other than me ever uses this… well we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’ve been home brewing for about a year now and this seemed like a good idea. There are a lot of tools out there that do some, and possibly all of what I’m anticipating putting on Brew Sessions. I’m not saying those tools are bad (I use a few of em), but for the most part they don’t meet my needs. This is aimed primarily at making me happy, but if you have a feature request feel free to drop me a line (josh at brewmanager.com) and I’ll consider it.

Here’s the feature list in case I get rid of it.

• Inventory Managment
• Brew Session Managment (it does the math for mash calculations, AAU etc
• Recipe Managment (build, save and search)
• Groups/clubs, with all of the above