BeerRiot - Local

As some of you may have noticed, BeerRiot - Local is live. Thanks to Corey for planting the seed - it's a mashup of Brewery locations and Google Maps. It's not exactly what I had planned at the outset, but I think it may be even better. :)

I call it "Local", but in reality, I just dump all of the breweries I know about onto the map. If you scroll away from wherever the map started, you'll find all of the other breweries in the proper places.

This makes things a little slower - there's over 100 pins on there. I checked out ACME's "Clusterer", but I just wasn't happy with the interaction it gave. I'll have to come up with some other solution soon, but for now, it looks like things actually run pretty decently as long as I'm not browsing with the G4 on which I'm also running my SQL server, web server, Safari with 10 other tabs, iTunes, emacs... You get the idea.

So, why Local as the next feature? Well, it has been one of the most requested features for one thing. For another, I really think it's important to drink locally. Drinking locally immerses you in the culture of the location, supports the smaller-scale guys honing their craft, and saves energy. Try some homebrew for the ultimate in local, but barring that, seek out any professional in your area and find our what they're pouring.

If you're interested in more reasons that drinking locally (or even just drinking beer in general) is a good idea, I recommend finding a copy of Chris O'Brien's Fermenting Revolution. Hey - and it looks like Chris has a wordpress blog too.

Categories: Beer Development