We would like to thank the author of the article, Molly Triffin, for including us. In honor of this article, we would also like to make a list of 12 Sexy Ways to use Beer Mapping!

12 Sexy Ways to use Beer Mapping

1. Use our Location Lookup Page
2. Bookmark our Mobile Site on your Phone (beermapping.com/m)
3. Participate in our Forums
4. Search the Maps by an Address
5. Use our Proximity Maps
6. Subscribe to our GPS Point of Information System
7. Add the Location of the Day gadget to your Google Homepage
8. Play the GABF Fantasy Draught (Late Aug/Early Sept)
9. Put a “Recent Reviews Map” on your Google Homepage
10. Build your own tools around the Beer Mapping API
11. Use our Beer Event Calendar
12. Add an Information Widget to your Blog

Here is the cover and a fuzzy picture of the article:

Basically this feature adds the ability to hide any locations on the city maps that you have already reviewed. If you want to see only the places that you have reviewed, that option is available as well.

As you can see from the image here, we have added three new icons/buttons to the City Maps (and Proximity Maps) that you can use to change the visibility settings. These options are only available if you are a registered user and if you are logged in to the site. They can be found at the top right of the map and they can be used to toggle locations you have reviewed on or off of the map. Hover over the icons to see what each one does, or read more about their functionality here.

The goal here is to help you find new locations in an area to visit and at the same time offer some help finding which locations you may have visited but have so far neglected to review. Get out there and drink some beer!

We hope to have this functionality available on all maps in the near future.

One section of the site that very few people check out, are our statistics. We like to be open about things and we intentionally expose many of the numbers that show how active (or inactive) parts of the site may be.

On our Statistics Page, you can see how many approved locations we have in the database (almost 8,000 at the time of this posting). We break it down by our major countries (scroll down). And on this page we list location images count (2,827), location review count (3,323) and other interesting statistics like average review score (82).

We even offer more statistics about activity on the site on our Activity Statistics Page. This page will show you graphs from the last 31 days (not including today). They’re not exactly real time, but they do give you an idea as to the activity of the site.

If you’re still digging the numbers and you aren’t satisfied yet, you can also check out our Forum Statistics Page. You can see when our most active months for posting were, and you can track how many users registered over the lifetime of the forums. I enjoy checking this page somewhat often and there is even a thread started in the forums about these statistics.

There is a little Beer Festival held in Colorado once a year that gives out awards to Breweries. Last year, we decided that if all other sports can have a “fantasy” side where people pick and manage teams, we could do the same with that beer festival.

So our Fantasy Draught allows the registered competitors to select Breweries from the list of entrants with the intent to build the best “team”. A Gold medal winning beer will award the person who picked that brewery with three points. A silver medal equals two points and bronze is only a single point. The competitor who has the most points when the medals are tallied will be the winner and will likely end up with a t-shirt and a book or some similar prizes.

The Draught proceeds in a snake like manner, going up and then back down the list of competitors in order. Then when a brewery is picked by a competitor that brewery is gone for good, narrowing the list by one for the next picker.

The competition is free. You simply need to be a registered member of the site to compete. The slots are about half way filled, so if you want to enter, all you need to do is click here to start the sign up proceedure.

Any questions can be asked in this thread in our forums, or left here in the comments.

After a search is performed, a user can choose to download the results of a search as a .csv based POI file.

The Point of Interest download ability is available to registered members who have subscribed to the service. A lifetime subscription is available now in the Beer Mapping Shop for 15 dollars.

Discussion about POI files and how you can easily format or manipulate them will be taking place in our forums. The discussion is open to all and that forum section can be found here.

Click Here to get Started.

Well, we are touched by his comment (on page 80 of issue 2 – Jan/Feb 08) and we think if you would like to read more about us or other Beer Sites on the web you should head out to your local Barnes and Noble or other news stand to pick up a copy. Or possibly you could click here and buy a digital copy of the issue online if you roll that way.

Regardless, we will accept that Pulitzer Prize nomination on the condition that we expect that any money that we could be eligible to win be distributed to some of the small Brewpubs and Breweries just starting out this year without hop contracts.

Happy 2008!

The Beer Mapping Project has had a very successful 2007. Here is a list of what we have accomplished during the past year:

• We opened up the Beer Mapping Forums
• We built a unique location review system
• We implemented Proximity Search, including maps by Proximity
• We extended our reach into multiple new countries
• We completed the Beer Trip Planner
• We massively rewrote the City Beer Map system and released tons of new City Beer Maps.
• We started an online shop where we are selling t-shirts and stickers
• We ran a Fantasy GABF Draught with live reporting of the winners!
• We set up ways for you to interact with the Beer Mapping Project through other means, like facebook, blogger, wordpress and other blogs or sites
• We added search to the City Beer Maps!
• We possibly found you as a new Beer Mapping User!

We did not save the world in 2007. We felt that we needed to leave something for us to strive for in 2008! Happy New Year!

We want our presence to be felt there and we are introducing the first of our Beer Mapping applications there.

The Beer Mapping Badge

The Beer Mapping Badge is an application that you can add to your profile page and use it to show others how involved you are with The Beer Mapping Project. You simply add the application and make sure when you are adding it that you update it with your current Beer Mapping Project username.

Click here to add the Application – Click here if you don’t already have a facebook account.

The Beer Mapping Project also has a facebook group that you can join. Feel free to join the group and post images or information there.

Let us know if you have suggestions for future applications or if you have comments about the Beer Mapping Badge. There is a discussion thread about it here in our forums.

Wordpress Information:

This plugin is actually a widget that gives you the option to add your Beer Mapping Profile information into your sidebar. You will configure this widget easily via the widget management page in the Presentation area of your Administration panel. There are three options as the following image shows:

From the above image you can see that you have the option to add the name of the widget and you have a place to type your Beer Mapping user name in order to tie the widget into your Beer Mapping profile. There are also two check boxes. The first check box should be selected if you wish to display your statistics, information and avatar. The second check box is an option that you can select if you wish to display a list of the top ten locations that you have reviewed here.

Either check box or neither check box can be selected. But if you select neither, then you won’t actually see anything. So you should probably at least check one.

Wordpress Installation Instructions:
To download and install, simply download from the official Wordpress Plugin Section:
Beer Mapping Wordpress Widget
Unzip the file and upload bmpbadge.php into your wp-content/plugins/ folder.
Activate the plugin via the Plugins page in your administration panel.
Update and set up your widget via the Presentation>Widgets page.

Blogger and Wordpress.com Information
Blogger or Wordpress.com bloggers can also have and use this Beer Mapping Badge. Neither of these blogs use the same sort of open widget system as the regular wordpress blogs, but they can still add and edit html into the side bars of the blog template.

You will simply have to copy and paste the following code into an “html/javascript” block when editing your blog’s sidebar.

You have to remember to change the place in the code where it says “YOURUSERNAMEHERE”. Obviously you simply switch that code to your correctly spelled Beer Mapping project username.

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://beermapping.com/beermappers/feed2js/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fbeermapping.com%2Fbeermappers%2Fbadge.php%3Fu%3DYOURUSERNAMEHERE&amp;chan=y&amp;num=1&amp;html=a" type="text/javascript"></script>

The following image is an example of what the code displays as in a blogger.com blog

Give it a shot and report back if it works or not! We also have a similar application that we are beta testing for facebook. Stay tuned and we will likely be launching that one in a couple of days.

Something has to give.

Buy a shirt and I’ll mail it asap and hopefully we can ween down the supplies before we all gorge ourselves on Turkey!

Buy a Charcoal shirt!

The Blue One Matches Your Eyes!

A t-shirt box fell on me, please send help.