about/HOMEBREWANDBEER.COM
The site
Homebrewandbeer.com is a hobby for us. We don't make any money from it, don't accept advertising and pay for the web hosting ourselves. As much as we'd like to make our livings from beer, we both have grown-up jobs. Because of pesky work we don't always have the time that we'd like to devote to beer and beer-related activity such as homebrewandbeer.com.
The site began life in 2000 as Oliver and Geoff's Homebrew and Beer Page. All we'd really intended was that it would be a place where we could post our homebrew recipes for others to see. Over the years friends had sent us beer quotes and photos, so we thought we'd add them, too. We then added a couple of other sections, such as homebrewing techniques and brewing ingredients.
Before we knew it we were getting dozens of emails from around the world from people with questions about homebrewing. This led to us creating the Q+A section. This, too, eventually became far too time-consuming, and in July 2004 we added the Homebrew and beer forum.
During the site's life we've added some new sections and rewritten or revamped others. The site has had several makeovers in its time. Here is how it looked in 2002 and 2004.
Boring technical stuff
The entire contents of the site, except things in the Bits and Pieces section, was written by Oliver. He also hand-coded the HTML for pretty much everything using Notepad and, later, the open source Notepad++, on a PC.
After reading Elizabeth Castro's excellent book HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Oliver set about developing a website about beer and homebrew. Some planning went into it (usually over beer with Geoff), where we came up with ideas such as the Reviews section and Beer of the Year.
The sixth version of Castro's book, called HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guidewas published in 2006. While it may be a bit out of date, it would still be great reading for those wanting to learn HTML.
I also read the book Javascript for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide 4th edition. Unfortunately, I found this book confusing and unhelpful. In any case, I realised that a site without javascript was usually a site that will be compliant with more browsers, take less time to load and be simpler. The site uses javascript in some places, to open windows or to create pulldown lists such as in Our homebrews. Those scripts were obtained from websites offering free javascript.
The forum uses phpbb, a free bulletin board that runs on many databases. Ours runs on MySQL.
In late 2004, Oliver decided it was time for a major overhaul of the site. After reading Kynn Bartlett's great book about web development called Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours, Oliver set about revamping the site, making it cleaner and doing away with the frame-based layout. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, centralises the styles used on websites, making it very easy to change the look of a site by changing the contents of one file.
Photo editing is done with GIMP, an open-source program very similar to Adobe Photoshop, but without the (in fact without a) price tag.
Initially, we had used web space provided as part of our email packages. In September 2002 we registered the domain homebrewandbeer.com. It is now hosted by Chariot.
The FTP client FileZilla is used to transfer files to the web server.
