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SSL certificate renewed
Website Comments by FLASHPRO
Anyone who visited the site today, up until now, may have gotten a security error. I didn't realize the SSL certificate was only good to yesterday. It was already renewed, but I needed to install it. All good now!
4 years ago
Very nice Flashpro !! Thank you :) My question is still the same I have previously asked (and not debating here - just asking) if most of us are working from a computer, instead of their phones... to review and all ? I tried once to do a review on my cell and it refreshed by itself halfway, so lost that and never did again. Now, write in my notes and redo them here later. If the layout is as good for computer, than the phone, then it is all cool. I just know that most beer reviews I read online now, are mostly done by the younger crowd - on Untappd or any other of those simple sites, that people post their photos of the beer and a few words about it. I am thinking the drinking right now thing you added here is to get these new raters, right ?
The new site has a layout that works perfectly in both desktop and mobile, while not actually using different code. I don't think the new site should refresh the screen and lose your data, unless it takes you more than 15 minutes or so to submit the data. Sometimes I use the current site to leave reviews on my phone and it's a real pain because the form doesn't fit on the screen! The Drinking Now feature was supposed to add some interactivity because there are plenty of times when you're just having a beer that you've already reviewed. The new version builds on this, making it even more interactive. There's a beer/glass icon on the top menu that pops open to show who is drinking at any given moment. It updates instantly without you having to refresh the page. It also changes color to remind you that you're drinking something, and clicking the icon will have a quick link to for you to review the beer.
I've also added a "like" button to beer and brewery profile pages so you can simply like something without having to go through all the trouble of reviewing it if you don't care to. You can upload beer photos that go into a photo album of the beer. They can be made private as well.
Another feature that I've already got working is private messaging. You're able to have real time chats with people, even as you browse the site and change pages. It opens up a pop up that can be hidden so you can write in a review while alternating between the chat window and the review, or whatever page you're on. The popup has another drop down menu to let you switch between different people. It lets you know if you have unread messages from that person. There's a little notification that appears for a few seconds the instant you receive a message from anyone. The same notification area lets you know when you've received other bits of news, like uCaps, comments, beer pal request, etc. I've just started working on a chat room again. It's pretty simple to do now that I've got the private messaging working. People seem to love it or hate it, but there were definitely a lot of people who use it regularly before. Again, the goal is to give people something to do when they're drinking alone, and you'll be able to close the room window while you're browsing the site, without exiting the room.
Will brewery pages update more frequently? I think the beer ones do now. I was browsing the other day and one of our more prolific Canadian breweries, "Collective Arts Brewing" has 1204 page views, 78 beers, and ZERO reviews. But when I add up all the reviews, it's 128 or so. I've noticed similar issues on other brewery pages. Also, character sets. If I enter Fuller's or Beau's into the search engine, I get no results, despite both brewers having a ton of active beers on the site (if I truncate before the apostrophe I'm fine). similarly, trying to add a beer from a website with the word kölsch in the title can add funky results. And Czech characters, don't get me started on them :)
I think the brewery pages were supposed to update whenever a beer for it was reviewed, but I could be wrong. I have some scripts that I used to run every once in a while to recount everything. BP3.0 shouldn't have that problem. Laravel Vapor has queued jobs that the site can use to run calculations offline after a visitor does something . It can also schedule jobs to be run regularly without anyone visiting the site. I'm using those to recount stuff daily!