I decided to create a simple photo gallery Tumblr to use as a personal photo dump. I’ve set up Instagr.am to cross post to it, and I’ll be posting other photos there as well.
Sorry to disappoint any of those who follow me on here expecting regular posts. Honestly, I had kind of forgotten about Tumblr for a little bit there. I’ve been so busy with personal projects, freelance work, and preparing for a new baby in March!
Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to:
BrewTrackr - I designed and developed a site to help users track the beer they drink. The idea originally came from a friend of mine and I decided to take on the project to help myself learn some PHP. It’s been a blast to work on and fun to use too. Anyone who likes trying and tracking new beer will enjoy it. Hit me up if you want an invite to our beta release.
Salon Desireé - After a couple years I’ve finally gotten my wife’s boss to let me redesign her website. This is the current project I’m working on and I can say that it’s a 100% improvement over the current site, which was put up many years ago.
Baby - Corinne and I are expecting our first child, due March 24, and we’re extremely excited for this new chapter in our lives. Days off have been spent getting the nursery ready and it’s coming together very nicely. I’m almost jealous of this kid’s room and he/she is not even here yet. I’ll be sure to post a photo soon.
BrewTrackr is something I’ve been working on for the better part of the year. I’ve been using it to teach myself a bit of PHP, MySQL, and CodeIgniter (a PHP framework). But it’s finally launched - in a private beta for the time being - and it’s very exciting.
BrewTrackr is an idea a friend of mine had that I decided to help him out with while I learned PHP. It’s a way to track what beer you’ve had. I’m sure many people have the problem of not remembering every beer you have tried, and if you do remember you may not remember how you liked it. BrewTrackr was built to remedy this problem.
With BrewTrackr you can add beers to your “tab” when you try them, rate them 1-5, write personal tasting notes (or where you were, who you were with, etc.), and write public reviews. All this is used to help you remember what beer you really like. You can even save a beer as a favorite to find it again more easily.
While there are other services out there which are similar, this is distinctly different in that it’s more of a personal tracker rather than something to broadcast what you’re drinking (for example, services like Untappd). There is certainly a social element to it where you can follow your friends and see what they’re drinking, it doesn’t lie at the core of the website.
Some technical points: it’s built on CodeIgniter and uses Foundation as a CSS framework. This makes it a responsive design so it scales down to mobile size very nicely. That way it’s extremely easy to add beer to your tab while out at the bar or elsewhere.
We launched in private beta over the weekend and have seen some use already which is great! We’re really excited to see where this goes and want to see this succeed in being a useful tool to others.
P.S. If anyone wants or needs an invite code just let me know and I’ll hook you up.
Expand-a-Pant - Corinne and I fast tracked this thing from idea to prototype in about half an hour (Taken with instagram)
