about/HOMEBREWANDBEER.COM
Technical information
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 on a PC, with the exception of the Homebrew and beer forum..
After reading Elizabeth Castro's excellent book HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (it's now in its fifth edition, 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.
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.
Due to the volume of emails from people wanting homebrew advice, we launched our Q+A section. This, too, eventually became a nightmare to manage, and in July 2004 we added the Homebrew and beer forum. 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 excellent 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, are a method of page layout that is becoming more and more common on the web because it simplifies site management by centralising most of the formatting.
The site was designed on Adobe InDesign. The graphic elements were exported as JPEG files, opened in Adobe Photoshop and saved as GIF images for use on the site.
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 Netconnect in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.
