Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

Thanks for looking guys. This site has been a side-project/hobby of mine for a while now. The past few days for me have been spent rewriting it from the ground up to be a much better site. I know that there are other beer sites out there, but I think that there is something special about making a service like this freely available and open source, and I'm really proud of what I've created.<p>You can check out the code here: <a href="https://github.com/davidcelis/goodbre.ws/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidcelis/goodbre.ws/</a><p>The code that powers the recommendations themselves is here: <a href="https://github.com/davidcelis/recommendable/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidcelis/recommendable/</a><p>Any feedback would be nice. This new design is in its infancy but, as far as I can tell, it's been very stable. If you find a bug, please, please let me know here or post on the issues tracker.

Maybe have some filtering by country visible on the home page. It took me a while to figure out you actually had British beers in your database.<p>Also, I realise you're a ruby programmer but you should really consider including Python IPA <a href="http://littlevalleybrewery.co.uk/our-beers/python-ipa" rel="nofollow">http://littlevalleybrewery.co.uk/our-beers/python-ipa</a> :)

I'm getting a DNS lookup failure (I'm in the Netherlands).

Some of the letters that have diacritics are stripped:<p>"Ležák" should be "Ležák" "M욻anský" should be "Měšťanský" "Velckopopovicky" should be "Velkopopovický"

I have problem risolving the site, dont know why, we have an internal DNS server (but i see that google's 8.8.8.8 can resolve it..)

I rated a few beers, but my recommendation screen is empty. I get that it's a new site, so I can accept that it might be tough to get recommendations right away, but it would be really helpful to explain <i>why</i> there aren't any results. Is it because I haven't rated enough beers? Is it because there aren't enough other users that have similar tastes? Is it because there's a delay before results show up?<p>Also, I had to try searching for some beers multiple times because my search didn't quite match how it's entered in your database. For example, I didn't realize that "redhook" is one word instead of two. I know that search is tricky and it's perfectly understandable, but I just thought I'd let you know.<p>Other than that, it looks great. I'll definitely be checking back for recommendations in the future.

Good site. Some comments:<p>- After a search or going to my profile, getting back to my dashboard should be more obvious.<p>- "Fridge" is an odd term and icon for the want-to-try mark.<p>- Can I submit beers?<p>Looking forward to updates.

I like the design, it's quite clean. Your blogs make for interesting reading too.<p>The concept reminds me of Untappd (<a href="http://untappd.com/" rel="nofollow">http://untappd.com/</a>) though theirs is a mobile app.<p>I was also impressed that this didn't just limit down to American beers, but it had some of my native Aussie beers also. Nice work!<p>Ideas:<p>- Maybe load the beer names via AJAX for the search box so that I can get suggestions of what I'm typing for.<p>- Have a mouseover tooltip on the thumbs up/down, bookmark etc. buttons so that I know what they do. It's not immediately obvious what the eye button does.

Not sure if you're managing your own DB or not but it might be worth looking into <a href="http://www.brewerydb.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brewerydb.com/</a>

My comment is that UX wise, I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing on the site. It took me a few minutes to realize there was a search bar in the upper right that really is the focus for finding the beer you like and seeding the database to get recommendations. I'd add some sort of initial training session, and generally feature the search bar as a sort of "improve your recommendations, rate some beers!" feature.

Nice site. I found all the beers I was searching for easily. I think I'd use this more on my mobile phone while at the bar vs on my desktop.

Down for me...<p><a href="http://downorme.com/goodbre.ws" rel="nofollow">http://downorme.com/goodbre.ws</a>

Cool site! I would suggest trying to scrape taphunter.com to find beers to add to your system. Doing that weekly for some of the bigger beer towns in the country would add a bunch of brews to your list.

For the non nerd two things: - login via FB/Twitter would be nice - user voice (or similar) feedback instead of GitHub issues page: no non-coder is gonna leave you feedback there!

You got a great start here. <a href="http://www.brewgene.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brewgene.com/</a> exists, but I don't think its recommendations are very good.

How long until I can get recommendations? I rated a few beers but it would be nice to have at least some kinda estimation on how many I would have to rate.

Great! And also, this website is a great example how Twitter Bootstrap theme should look like.

DNS Lookup Failure in Argentina.

See also: <a href="http://brewtoad.com/" rel="nofollow">http://brewtoad.com/</a>

I dont trust code to suggest me beer.... my tastebuds own any script ;)

Hmm, site seems to be down?