Checked off a few random things on the ever-growing TODO list for Hopville this weekend.

• Added BJCP style validation to Beer Calculus.  As you work on recipes in the calculator, you’ll see warnings whenever the calculations seem to put your recipe out of bounds for the chosen beer style.  These warnings can be ignored entirely, but at least the information is now available where it would be most useful.
• Added a random recipe link to the recipe navigation menu.  Self-explanatory.  And fun!  Try it!
• Moved Beer Calculus so that it lives under the hopville.com domain at beercalculus.hopville.com.  This shouldn’t have any effect on users, but it’ll help with Hopville’s “Google juice”, keep me from having to jump through hoops to maintain state between two domains, and make it more apparent that Hopville is there to support Beer Calculus.  Since the calculator preceded Hopville by so many years, lots of folks don’t even know they can save their BC recipes yet!

Current recipe count: 2026

I was traveling through Oregon this weekend and decided to take a detour to the real Hopville, a rural area in Oregon.  Google Maps makes it pretty clear that Hopville is a placeless place, in that there is no town or village or landmark to speak of.  But Google suggests that it does have a location, which it places along a roadside by some farmhouses.  The driving directions from Eugene actually ended with the grand finale: “Turn left at Wigrich Rd, then go 75 ft.”

The location of Hopville, OR according to Google Maps

So, I had to go there, and I had to turn left at Wigrich road, and I had to go that 75 ft.  How could I not?  Knowing in advance that “Hopville” would amount to two Willamette Valley crop fields divided by a road, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of those two fields is for hops.  Trellised fields were pretty common in the area, as I discovered with a little more exploration.  I drove around for a while looking for a sign (literally, a sign) that I was in Hopville, hoping to snap some photos to use on Hopville.com.  (Ever notice that the site has no logo?  Well, one day soon, I hope that it will, and a snapshot with the word “Hopville” might’ve helped a bit.)  But here’s the thing: I never found any sign of Hopville.  But I did find, at the dead end of Wigrich Road (a right turn on Wigrich being the dead end direction), a very good sign:

Yep, I stumpled upon the very hop yard where the estimable Oregon brewery Rogue grows and processes its own hops.

I researched this a bit online after I’d returned home.  Rogue never mentions Hopville in any of their literature, so I am not sure if anyone besides Google believes the place exists. But, I’m just sayin’, here’s a wider view of the Hopville map:

Rogue brands their hops using a town a few miles northwest of this area, a town called Independence.  Apparently it was once the “hop capital of the world”.  From Rogue’s press release:

In May of 2008, Rogue entered into a strategic alliance with heritage hop growers the Coleman family. Rogue planted 22 acres of hops and will add 20 more this fall on the former John I. Haas Alluvial Hop Farm just south of Independence. The land, at the end of Wigrich Road, is part of a historic hop farm called the Wigrich Ranch, that in the 1920s was the largest hop yard under a single trellis in the world.

Quite a coincidence considering that I was only trying to find Hopville; apparently Rogue was too.  If I didn’t have Maritime Pacific as my neighborhood brewery in Seattle, I think Rogue would have to be Hopville’s official microbrewery.  Maybe I should return during growing season so I can see hops on those trellises and see if Rogue wants to sponsor their “neighborhood website”.  Hmm….

Current Hopville recipe count: 1554. Hey, ain’t that a beer?

Yesterday was truly an historic day, folks.  Know why?  Hopville passed the mark of 1,000 homebrew recipes.  That’s pretty good for an almost-ready website, I’d say.  (Apparently, there was some sort of election too.  Check the interwebs.)

When I last checked in about development status, I was about to shoehorn the BJCP style information into the database.  Well, consider the  most recent guidelines shoehorned.  They still need to be cleaned up a little bit, the textual data was a little messy, but at least the stats and descriptions are there now for easy reference.  In the process of fleshing out the style pages, I also made it easier to browse recipes within the style, narrowing down to extract, all grain, or partial mash.  And the relatively new search feature is an easy way to cut through the database looking for specific styles too.

In other developments:

• I finally opened up the ingredients database to the masses. Previously I was the only person who could add new ingredients into the database, so folks had to drop me an email request or list their unlisted ingredients inside the recipe notes.  Now anybody can add anything right into the recipe on their own.
• To accommodate an open ingredient database, I added inline ingredient search to Beer Calculus.  Now, rather than having to read through an alphabetical select box to find the malt, hop, yeast, or miscellaneous ingredient you need, you can switch on a search box and find the selection by typing a keyword or two.  And if the ingredient you’re searching for can’t be found, it’s easy to add it.
• Previously all IBU results were calculated using an ages-old custom formula that combined parts of the “Daniels method” with the “Garetz method”.  I’ve now updated the IBU number to be customizable to the popular formulas (Tinseth, Garetz, Rager), but I also left in the old “Hopville method” so that existing recipes keep their existing IBU value.  By default, new recipes added to Hopville will calculate IBUs by averaging the three commonly used formulas, but brewers with a formula preference can customize to use that instead.
• Fixed some rounding errors introduced by the recent migration to metrics-based recipe storage, and some other bugs I introduced in the broad sweep of new changes.

Current recipe count: 675

It’s difficult trying to standardize colors across a site. I picked up a tip somewhere to keep a legend at the top of a stylesheet, something like this;

/*
HOPVILLE COLORS
F9F9FF off white
4a443c main text
B34700 link text
FF6600 action link text
eeeeee tiger body
*/

Then you have an easy hex color reference right at the top of your main stylesheet. But “easy” becomes relative. On Hopville, I ended up describing shades of green as “medium”, “medium light”, “lightest”, and “extra-lightest”. Extra-lightest green? Which one was that again? And as the site’s color scheme has evolved, the legend has gotten out of date.  Some of the colors on the site aren’t in the legend any more, some of the colors in the legend aren’t in use anymore, and so on.
It just occurred to me that this could be automated, that I could scan all the stylesheets with a script, pull out the color attributes, and generate a color swatch page on the fly.  So when I want “that one shade of green”, I can go look it up and cut and paste the hex value, without having to dig through stylesheets or maintain a color palette legend.  Rails made it easy to generate it on the fly with an erb template (ignoring MVC for simplicity’s sake) and not even have to set up a cronjob.

Dynamic color palette browser created from stylesheets in Rails.

The code:

<%
stylesheet_dir = RAILS_ROOT + '/public/stylesheets'
files = Dir.open(stylesheet_dir)
css_files = []
colors_in_stylesheets = Hash.new {}

files.each do |file|
  if file.match(/\.css$/)
     File.open(stylesheet_dir + '/' + file).each do |line|
        if line.match(/\#([0-9a-f]{3,6})\;/i)
          unless colors_in_stylesheets[file]
            colors_in_stylesheets[file] = {}
          end
          colors_in_stylesheets[file][$1.downcase] = 1
        end
      end
  end
end

block_size = 100
%>

<style type="text/css">
div.swatch-block {
  margin:10px;
  float:left;
  width:<%= block_size %>px;
  height:<%= block_size %>px;
  text-align:center;
  border:1px dotted #ccc;
}
div.swatch-block span {
  background-color:#fff;
  color:#999;
  border:1px dotted #ccc;
  padding:3px;
}
h2 { clear:left; }
</style>

<h1>Color Swatch</h1>
<% colors_in_stylesheets.keys.sort{|a,b|
   colors_in_stylesheets[b].size <=> colors_in_stylesheets[a].size
   }.each do |stylesheet| %>
  <h2><%= stylesheet %></h2>
  <% colors_in_stylesheets[stylesheet].sort.each do |color, garbage| %>
    <div class="swatch-block" style="background-color:#<%= color %>;">
    <span><%= color %></span>
    </div>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

This works great for me since I always use hex colors, but I imagine it could be tweaked to find other color definitions as well.

Continuing my second sweep through Hopville, lots of new stuff happened over the weekend:

• New “miscellaneous ingredients” section added to the recipe page to handle flavorings, clarifiers, etc.
• Recipe types have been added.  Search and style browsing both now include filtering by recipe type so you can find relevant recipes (all grain, extract, partial mash) more easily.
• Recipes can now be exported as BeerXML.
• Lots of little UI tweaks in pursuit of beery beauty.

Right now I’m trying to shoehorn the 2008 BJCP style guidelines into the database, and fleshing out new style pages that will make all the style information readily available on Hopville.

Current recipe count: 633

I’ve pretty much burnt out on fixing up my house, which has been my big summer project.  So now it’s back to working on stuff in my newly clean office space.  It’s stylin’.  I’m preparing a significant Hopville release right now, but it’s mostly significant in the guts of the program.  I’m converting the database to use metric units to store all recipe measurements.  This will make the site a lot more useful for non-U.S. folks.  It’s true that most users of the site are in the States, but that’s partly because the site is effectively useless for non-citizens.  We’re the only remaining stalwarts of the ancient English system.  Except maybe Burma.  And Liberia.  Not a lot of homebrewing going on in those locales.

But I’m not just converting to metric in order to feel wordly.  This change will also facilitate recipe importing and exporting features.  BeerXML is the language that brewing software uses to communicate with other brewing software about recipes, and it only speaks metric.

The metrics conversion shouldn’t affect U.S. users at all, the Beer Calculus interface and calculations will remain the same (assuming I didn’t mess up…but I’m being especially careful with this release), but users will be able to create, view, and edit recipes in whichever system they like.  Hopefully I’ll be rolling out that release by the end of the weekend, along with some navigation improvements.

Speaking of navigation improvements, I finally added search to Hopville this week.  It was a big, gaping hole in the site navigation so I’m glad some users contacted me to cow-prod me into adding it.

Current recipe count: 613

The Hopville recipe count turned 100 today! Okay, it’s a relatively small milestone, but it’s also the very first milestone. And when you launch a site with three recipes on it, do no promotion/advertising/blog commenting, and have almost no Google exposure (which is still true…Google’s last crawl was on the 11th), 100 feels like a lot of recipes. Hey G, why don’tcha come on back and see us sometime? We’d like that. The more, the merrier. With 41 registered users, I think we might’ve already surpassed the population count of the real Hopville, OR.

In other news, recent developments on the site:

• First draft of fleshed-out brewer profile pages. You can now add a profile picture, a link to your website, and a few words about your brewing self to the profile page. That page has been split into tabbed pages for Recent Activity, Recipes Created, Recipes Favorite-d, and Comments.
• Editing individual ingredients in Beer Calculus is now AJAX-based, so each page load as the recipe gets designed and updated is a wee bit faster than it was before.
• Completed the list of recipe types so all BJCP beer styles are represented.
• Added a beer style dropdown to the style page, making it easy to switch between styles when browsing recipes. Search soon to follow.
• As usual, lots of little design changes accompanied these updates.

I managed to avoid hangovers this weekend – at least, debilitating ones – and made more steady progress on Hopville. When I started thinking about releasing the site as fast and light-weight as possible, I reckoned there’d be three stages of the initial roll-out. With the addition of the recipe comments feature, I’m about half way done with the “second phase”. I suppose that means I’m about half way to a launch-ready site, and the current participants are unwittingly acting as Beta testers. Shhh…

New Stuff

• Comments are now allowed on recipes, so brewers can share questions, compliments, and tips on their recipes

• The points per gallon of sugar extract, as well as the lovibond rating of each fermentable ingredient, are now customizable.  Previously there were default settings for each ingredient, which were fixed and never displayed.  That was handy for keeping the interface clean, but continued design tweaks on the calculator are facilitating more customization options without huge costs in terms of clutter.

• Added White Labs yeast strains, as well as Rice Hulls as a mash/sparge ingredient

Other Updates

• Improved the way stylesheets handle the “printable” version of pages, so more information is displayed on the printed version, and a separate version no longer needs to be maintained

• Fixed some bugs with “save” versus “save as” when updating saved recipes

• Made the maximum weight per fermentable ingredient dynamic, dependent on batch size. Most people will never know this happened, but it’s much more convenient for folks brewing batches of 10+ gallons.

Current recipe count: 74

After hosting an out-of-towner and then catching a mild but brain-freezing cold, I got back into Hopville development last night.

• Merged the recipe display code for Hopville and Beer Calculus. This will help keep them in sync visually and ensure that bug fixes on one will immediately apply to the other
• Design improvements on Hopville recipe page
• Bug fixes: handled recipe editing edge cases, added and fixed functionality to the favorites feature (where you can save other brewers’ recipes into your recipe file), fixed bug with changing hop forms in the calculator
• Show IBU correction information only when applicable

No major feature additions but several are likely to happen by the end of the weekend.

Current recipe count: 59