The New Year is going to be the most exciting yet for this site.

About nine months ago, I made a decision to concentrate soley on the re-development of this site; after all, what harm could eight weeks without an income do? Thirty-six weeks later :), I now know why no one has attempted what was promised last year, a website that; has an information side that is fast and easy to use and covers brewers at all stages and their circumstances; is far more dynamic and customisable than the current site; encourages and rewards positive participation; and encourages and rewards brewing skills and the transferring of these skills to other members.

The greatest paradox is that the hardest thing about creating a site with the above aims has been to find non-brewing information easily. It has been interesting to see how the answer to so many fairly simple IT questions has taken hours to find and, if an answer did exist, then often the answer was difficult or impossible to understand - a bit like what many new brewers find.

It's very nice to actually take a break tonight and write this post as the constant concentration often makes you lose sight of how easy, fun and interesting the new site will be.

I hope you enjoy it and that 2017 is an exciting one for all members,
Pat 

[center]Thanks to and Introducing...[/center]
Many thanks to all members who frequent this site and have had the patience to dig for the gold that is buried in the current site format and wait for the long-promised changes.

Financial Contributors

Finances have never worried me previously on this site (they do now!!!) however, I have always really appreciated those who took the time to make a donation as it is a very rare event. I have all donations recorded and these will be reflected and given value on the new site. I'm treating them like bonds, I think anyone who has donated in the past deserves "extra" credit/reward as they have donated without any expectation of reward.
Those who donate now, before the new site opens, will also get extra reward although not quite as much as the above brewers. (I'll see if I can get a link working in the next few days as, on the current skin, there isn't even a link to donate!)

BIABrewer.info Council

You can see them here. These are the brewers who are the backbone of the site. They either answer questions diligently and/or operate behind the scenes. They are the brewers I, and the site, neglect the most and rely on the most. For me, personally, they make a huge difference.

Mikey
I've been employing Mikey a few days each week to tackle the IT stuff. Making the IT challenges of the new site possible, yet alone easy to administer, has been a complex. Mikey has been constantly thrown into the deep end of IT, areas he was not specialised in, but always comes up swimming. He's been a pleasure to work with and communicate with. Sarah and I are gradually teaching him how to drink beer whilst working...

Introducing Sarah 'Brucey' Williams.

Sarah is the daughter of old family friends. She loves beer, brewing and a good laugh. One of the first jobs I gave her was to write a profile on me. Here is what she came up with...

Patrick 'Patch' Hollingdale: Patch is an ex-inspirational speaker, heavy drinker, seasoned brewer and chain smoker. His main claim to fame is that he invented the Brew-in-a-Bag method and started BIABrewer.info about ten years ago. He has won multiple awards for his beers, but now mostly spends his time getting Sarah drunk, complaining that she is drunk, and whinging about her not getting off his couch the next morning.

As you can see, Sarah writes brilliantly (not accurately though) and has heard of things like Instabook and Twittergram - I think that is what they are called? As the new site has two distinct sides, information and community, I think Sarah is the ideal person to run the community side. She has been a massive help over the last six months, even after I could no longer to even afford to pay her a modest hourly rate.

She has openly confessed to me, from the start though, that she is impatient; she likes constant excitement. The last few months of painfully slow progress on what we thought would be easy things are frustrating. I'm going to reserve the next post for Sarah to advise you of the exciting stuff.

I hope that you will all check her post below regularly (the email notifications on this site are erratic at best) and keep her excited with your feedback.

[center]What Is Going to Happen[/center]
Sarah will begin a new thread on this within the next week. When it's created, we'll update this thread and link the heading of this post to it. [EDIT: Done, at last!]

Feel free to comment here though on any wishes you have for the New Year or from the site.

All the best,
Pat

Lol Streamer and good on you Richard  :thumbs:

Will lock this thread now as What's Happening to BIABrewer.info in 2017 is now up and running.

A Little Update

We are running behind on some of the above; Mikey is now working full-time and Sarah has had family visiting, leaving etc., all last week. I've been learning yet another bit of software (Bootstrap Studio - quite good actually).

Sarah is working at a festival this weekend, however, Mikey will be here on Sunday so I think we'll disable the board for a while on Sunday and move it to the new host. That will:

a) Fix the email notification problem we have here
b) Make the future site change-over much easier
c) Save a heap of time at this end (during this whole process we have alternated the new site between three different hosts, four if you include Mikey's local instance ).
d) Discover bugs and kill them faster!

Before then it would be great if you could...

[center]Test the Site Speed[/center]