Rob DiCiuccio

Beer Citizen: Beer Citizen now serving the mobile web

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:22:44 -0700

Beer Citizen: Beer Citizen now serving the mobile web:

The mobile web version of Beer Citizen is here! You can now take Beer Citizen with you to the pub! You can review, research, and share beers from the comfort of your barstool. All the essential features of the desktop site have been refined into a smartphone-friendly web app. It’s brand…

beercitizen: How Beer Citizen Uses Data It’s a question we’re...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:10:50 -0700

beercitizen:

How Beer Citizen Uses Data

It’s a question we’re asked often, and one we started with ourselves: what makes Beer Citizen different from other beer review apps? The short answer, as you may have surmised, is data. We created Beer Citizen as a new way to review beer by entering experiential data, and a new way to discover beers by leveraging that data.

Other review sites (even outside of the beer world) typically rely on written reviews or simple 5-star ratings. Written reviews are inherently subjective. By the time a beer has dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of reviews, how many do you have to read to get an understanding of what the beer is actually like? Other sites tend to use an overall rating as the main point of interest. While it tells you how much a community likes a beer, it doesn’t show you - at a glance - what you’ll experience in a beer.

Beer Citizen solves this problem by focusing on the data of the experience. By simply identifying perceived traits of a beer, and then quantifying the intensity of each, a review becomes much more useful, and more suited to explaining what a beer is like. As more people enter data for a given beer, each review factors into a beer’s overall profile. In one glance, you can see what the community as a whole thinks a beer looks, smells, tastes, and feels like. You can, of course, still enter written tasting notes (and more) with your review, but it’s the data that we believe will make Beer Citizen your go-to beer reference.

Beer Citizen is currently in Beta while we collect data (from people like you) and refine the system. As we get closer to a critical mass of review data, we’ll be introducing a ton of fun and useful tools. Ideas on the horizon include:

Discovering similar beers, based on trait data

Comparing a beer to a style as a whole

Comparing one style of beer to another

Searching for beers based on desired traits

These are just a few things we have on the roadmap, but we can’t do it without data. So grab a beer, enter a review, and help beer enthusiasts everywhere find a better beer. Let’s drink!

MySQL: fixing double-encoded UTF-8 data

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:52:00 -0700

Ever have double-encoded UTF-8 data in your MySQL database? Of course you have. Here’s a handy trick to quickly remedy that sticky situation, via MySQL command-line tools:

mysqldump -h DB_HOST -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --opt --quote-names --skip-set-charset --default-character-set=latin1 DB_NAME > DB_NAME-dump.sql mysql -h DB_HOST -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --default-character-set=utf8 DB_NAME < DB_NAME-dump.sql

That’s it! No scripts required.

Source: Odd, Even, Odd, Even…

Git Is Simpler Than You Think

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:39:08 -0700

nfarina:

It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award.

I made the executive decision to leave our comfy world of Versions because it seemed clear that Git was winning the Internet. There was much grumbling from my teammates, who were busy enough doing actual work thank you very much.

But I pressed forward. We signed up for accounts on Github. We learned how to type 'git push' and 'git pull'. We became more confident. Git is just like any other source control system! But it wasn’t long before one of our devs called me over to look at a…situation.

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18th & Valencia, SF

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:15:20 -0700

18th & Valencia, SF

Meanwhile, in Germany

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:15:00 -0700

Meanwhile, in Germany