A Life in the Day of beermapping.com
Some of my personal friends have asked lately what it is that I do at beermapping.com. And I can tell them that I do a stupendous amount of incredible things, simply because I have a cherubic face that enables me to convince them that I am telling the truth. But the reality is that unless I am actually coding, I am usually only doing janitorial work.
Well, this post is going to pictorially describe some of the things that I handle and some of the background concepts for this site. It might get a bit nerdy, but there are pictures!
Right upfront: I didn’t code the main pages here at this site. They are running on a wordpress.org backend. BUT I have made quite a few changes to the wordpress site and I have quite a few pages that aren’t really working on the wordpress backbone (location-lookup, location-submission and map-skip [map-skip isn't really live yet] are three that are my code interwoven into a wordpress site). I did make the pages look the way they do, which is different from any wordpress site that I have ever seen (not that this matters much).
The backbone of the mapping portion of the site is built upon the Google Mapping API. Our submission system is custom made and it is written in php and the database is mysql driven. The submissions all get thrown into a database and I get an email for each successful submission. I then will go to a page that looks like this to see the locations that are not “approved”. Each row here can stand for another location. We usually get between 5 and 10 submissions a day (sadly, a large number of the submitted locations are already in our database).
When a specific location is selected by me to double check whether it is someone’s grandfather’s homebrewery it will look similar to the following image.
From this page I can dynamically search google maps to verify the street address. I can double check that this establishment exists in the real world through google and I can double check the beermapping database to see whether this location has already been submitted. These are all very important issues in my opinion. And this page changes as I note that new features could be helpful.
The front page is rather busy, but it isn’t as busy as some of the other parts of the site. I like to track front page statistics though and this is why I love crazyegg.com. Crazy Egg allows for it’s users to use some special javascript to track mouse clicks and movement on the front page. There are some really, really cool things that you can do with Crazy Egg for free. The following few images are based off of a Crazy Egg test that I have been running for the past week.
They give you the option to see how many times certain links on your page have been clicked (click image for bigger and more link detail).
Crazy Egg also gives their users the ability to see lists of the page clicks. The following image is an example of that (click for bigger).
The final (and freaking coolest) thing that Crazy Egg offers is a “heatmap” of your page. The following image is the heatmap for the past week (click for big).
Note how the “hot spots” are the search options available on the right side of the home page. In the past 7-ish days, the “city search” option has been exercised Three Hundred and Forty times. 340! This is equal to a quarter of the visits to The Beer Mapping Project’s homepage. The Forums get 7-8 percent of the front page clicks (many of the forums users probably have a bookmark). And obviously the “location name search” and the beer map listing pages are following very closely as a valued front page resource.
I’m not exactly sure why, but it always amazes me that people use the city search over the location name search. I would think that I would personally use name search over city search. But it is clear to me from these results that I am not the same as others. Please let me know if there is something you need on the front page!
This is getting to be a long post, so I will just post the last three images with very little back story.
This first one is a google powered site statistics program (google.com/analytics) that I use occasionally (it doesn’t track all of our pages).
The following image is part of the wordpress backend. This specific part that I have centered in the image is an example of how technorati.com blends into wordpress. This part quickly updates the wordpress backend with people who have recently linked to our frontpage. I think it’s pretty valuable information that helps me to be aware of specific types of people visiting the site.
The last image is a symbol of a little bit of a victory over the internet! Since this blog started, we have blocked almost Nine Thousand, Five Hundred spam comments! It is amazing how full the internet is of spam. Luckily we have been given some proper tools to keep this blog free of spam posts. I will update when we hit our 10,000th blocked spam post (which will be very soon!)
Hopefully this gives some of you a bit of a background into what happens at beermapping.com. If you have any specific questions, feel free to comment. I’ll be more than happy to try to field them if possible!
March 5th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
I just added crazyegg to the blog. This is cool stuff.