SheppyBrew Home Page

After doing the updates mentioned in New SheppyBrew Website, I had copilot rewrite my SheppyBrew Home page. 

To be honest, I can't decide if I like copilot's version better or not. 

Just in case I think I want to go back, I'm storing what it was before here. 

Let me know what you think. 

........

New SheppyBrew Website

I spent some time recently updating the SheppyBrew Website.

The tech stack used on the site was very out of date and making any code changes to the site was very difficult.

If you're a computer geek at all, you could probably tell with the use of .aspx pages, and the fact that it really was not great on smaller screens.

But, really the main reason I felt I had to get the thing updated was that my hosting company sent me an email letting me know that support for the version of .NET was being removed from their servers "sometime this quarter".

 

Random SheppyBrew Recipes

After typing up SheppyBrew's Most Brewed Beers, I got to thinking ... "what am I going to do with my Roll-a-Style list once my 'Bench' has been emptied?"

Ok ... not something I have to worry about for a long time (and really ... why would I worry about it at all?) ... but in only 8 Roll-a-Style brews, my "Bench" will be empty.

As a computer geek, here is what I came up with: 

I made a change to SheppyBrew.com where my recipe page will randomly pick a previously brewed beer when the id=random.

IE ... 

http://www.sheppybrew.com/recipes/recipe.aspx?id=random

SheppyBrew.com Update

So ... Remember in SheppyBrew 2018 Year-End Brewing Stats, I mentioned:

"www.sheppybrew.com has been having issues. I hope to work on the website this year to correct those problems. I'm not sure what exactly is going on, but the website isn't always rendering the correct page."

The issue that I was referring to was that the server was caching my pages. This would have been fine, but the web server was not treating query strings as different content.

"Alexa ... Open Homebrew"

A couple of weeks ago I received an Amazon Echo.

I have been surprised how many people have no clue what an Amazon Echo is ... even when I mention the Alec Baldwin series of commercials for "Alexa".

In case you need to refresh your memory ...

I think these are well-done. They amuse me.

3218

Remember when I thought getting over 1000 page views for a month on this blog was a big deal? It was not that long ago that I reported May broke my page view record. Since then, every month has broken that record.

The page view total for September was 3218. I know that real bloggers probably think that is nothing, but for my little blog, that is a really big number.

Droid and beer

I have had severe phone envy of my wife since she got her Droid 2. But my Verizon "new every two" just came up I just got a new Droid 3. This is just a test email from the new phone as practice for the blog entries I will be making from GABF over the next few days.

The picture is of Victory brewing company's HopDevil IPA. The SheppyBrew Beer Model purchased a six pack for me while she and her mom were on their shopping weekend. Not bad at all.

Not a great photo, but ok for a blog test.

Now I really wish the GABF made a droid app instead of an iPhone app.!

Oh well, we will see how it goes.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone

#GABF Big Friendly Guide

In the category of  "ask and you shall receive" ... I got an email from my Contact Me form today in response to my blog post "My #GABF Game Plan".

Honestly, I was a bit bummed out that GABF spent the time and effort to develop an iPhone app. I love the concept. I just don't have an iPhone. Not only don't I have an iPhone, but I will never purchase an iPhone. My wife has an Android phone, so it would be better for me if they developed an Android app. But, personally, I think it would make much more sense to develop part of their website with this sort of functionality so EVERY smart phone could take advantage of the data they are making available for iPhone users.

Tweedle Beetles Return Part III

So, if you've been following along with  Tweedle Beetles Return Part I and Tweedle Beetles Return Part II. you may be asking yourself "Why is Sheppy so sure that the Tweedle Beetles are involved with this mess?" If you haven't been following along, go back and read Part I and Part II.

Tweedle Beetles Return Part II

picture from geocaching.com (of all places)

I know you have all been waiting with great anticipation for the exciting conclusion to Tweedle Beetles Return Part I. Ok, you probably don't care that much, but it is my blog, and this is what I'm posting today, so deal with it. If you need to catch up, go ahead and read part I. Go ahead, part II will still be here when you are done.

So, I have all these emails coming into my sheppybrew inbox. There were not so many that it was unmanageable. It was just annoying. So, what did I do? I decided to program a CAPTCHA challenge into adding comments to my site.

The Tweedle Beetles Return Part I

picture from geocaching.com (of all places)

I finally figured it out! Those sneaky little Tweedle Beetles are back! Well, I don't suppose they ever really left, but they have been quiet for quite some time. For whatever reason, they have decided to passive-aggressively attack me over the past several days. Sadly, it took me over a week to discover the identity of the attackers. Damn Tweedle Beetles!

Interesting Blog Stats

This post is doing very well in my blog stats.  Its page views are by far #1 for both the week (2011 Mar 2 – 2011 Mar 9) and the month (2011 Feb 7 – 2011 Mar 8).  It is actually very close to the top 10 "all-time" despite the fact that it was posted only a few days ago.  I've been doing this blog since 2005, so to be close to the top 10 "all-time" is significant.  I think the stats are actually only since July of 2010, but that is still somewhat significant for me.

Why is this post so popular?  No one has left any comments, so I can only speculate.  My guess is though, it has something to do with part of the title "Women wearing very little".  I'm guessing if people are flocking to my blog because they are expecting to see pictures of scantily dressed women, they are pretty disappointed when they get here.  Yes, that post had a couple of photos of some of the women who stopped by while my wife was out of town, but you can certainly get more of that sort of content elsewhere without having to be bored with the minutia my life.

Part of me wants to make a blog post with the title something like:  "Hot naked women doing all sorts of sexy things".  It would be interesting to see how much traffic that blog entry would get.  I'm not sure I want that kind of traffic, though.  Of course, maybe just having "Hot naked women doing all sorts of sexy things" in the text of this entry will generate some interest.  I guess I'll see.  If so, the internet surfers who drop by will be very disappointed again (probably even more so).

But, this phenomenon makes me think about some other stats that are somewhat mysterious to me.

My post Tweedle Beetles which I added over 5 years ago still gets enough hits to make the monthly top 10 page views every month.  So does Poison Rationality, which was written in October of 2008.  These two posts are by far my #1 and #2 viewed pages "all-time".  I cannot for the life of me figure out why in March of 2011, people are still coming to read these two pages.  I'm not sure what the motivation is, but I am pretty sure whoever those people are, they are being disappointed as well.

This month, for some reason, people are hitting SQL Partition clause (August of 2008).  All I put there was a link to another blog, basically just as sort of a way to bookmark it for my future reference.   Why people are coming here now for that, I have no idea.  I am pretty sure that if you google "SQL Partition Clause", there are pages and pages of much more useful results before you get to my entry.

And, another amazing thing is that my audience comes from all over the world.  This week, my top 10 countries visiting my blog are United States, Slovenia, Russia, Vietnam, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Iran, and South Korea.  This month, people from China and Netherlands have visited quite a bit (quite a bit is a relative term).  Quite honestly, before blogspot added in the stats tab, I figured that for the most part I had two regular visitors plus random lost souls who accidentally came by every once and awhile.

Of course, keep in mind that all these stats are relative to a lightly visited blog.  In each of the last couple of months, I've only gotten a little more than 500 page views.  The most I've ever gotten in a month is a little over 1000.  I don't know how many of those are repeats or bots just worming their way over the internet.  I don't know how many of those page viewers actually read.  I wish I could drill down a little more and figure some of this stuff out.  Yes, I'm a geek.

Anyway, if you made it to this paragraph in the blog, do me a favor and leave me a comment.  I want to know what brought you here.  I am especially interested if you are the kind of person who came by simply because "hot naked women doing all sorts of sexy things" is in the text of this post.  Don't worry, you can leave the comment anonymously. 

Missing Wife, Bottling Beer, Women wearing very little

I guess I just lost my wife.  I don't know she went.  So, I'm going to drink my money.  I'm not going to pay her rent.  Na-na-na-na, na-na, na I wanna start a fight.

Not really.  (By the way, those "lyrics" are based on Pink's song "So What".  Did you see what I did there?  I cleverly switched the word "husband" with "wife" and "he" with "she", and then also "his" with "her".  Those are not original "lyrics" and I do not want you to think I stole them without giving proper credit.)

My wife left me and the boys this week.  She left us so that she could go on a cruise with her mother.  This year, my wife will be turning 40 and her mom will be turning 65.  Papa Lou thought it would be nice to send his wife and daughter on a cruise in honor of the "big" birthdays.  It's nice for Tracy and her mom.  Sort of sucks for me, but that's another story, and I don't suppose anyone is going to feel sorry for me.  As long as they are having fun, I guess it is worth it.

Grammy's gift to our soon-to-be 9 year old

Saturday after the women left, Connor practiced riding his bike.  Then, we came home and bottled some beer.  Then, I made the kids straighten up most of the house while I cleaned up the kitchen.  Then, we played soccer (the kids beat me).  At some point, we made dinner and I let the kids watch a Harry Potter movie.  Sunday was more of the same sort of stuff. 

Of course the missing wife means that I had to work at home on Monday and Friday since half day kindergarten and even "full day" elementary school don't correspond with my normal working hours.  Luckily, my kindergartner is an independent little boy and able to entertain himself with minimal distractions to his father.  For this, I am extremely lucky.  Monday, he even made me a sandwich for lunch.  Of course, in return for having my lunch made, I had to make his Mac and Cheese, which I guess is fair.

He also made himself a beach by digging up some dirt into a container and pouring in some water.  Weird, but at least it kept in busy for awhile.  And, if he made a mess, he did a good job cleaning it up before I noticed.

I was surprised when it was time to get the bigger kid from school.  Instead of my sweet little 5-year-old, I found a mean looking Sith Lord with a scary looking light saber.  Somehow I survived that ordeal.  I should probably tell my wife what mortal danger I was in.  On second thought, she won't care.

I think I finally got the whole DNS issue with beer.ericshepard.com fixed.  It took awhile, because for some reason there was a host file out there for beer.ericshepard.com, whereas I had always just managed it as a sub-domain on the ericshepard.com host file.  I think the extra host file must have been created by GoDaddy when I set up the Sheppy Brew website as a sub-domain.  Anyway, all is well there for now.  I thought I had it fixed a couple times, though.  I think having more than one DNS host file doing the same thing confuses things so that they work for awhile and then stop.  Or, maybe I'm just crazy and it was either working or not the whole time.

During my missing-my-wife-insomnia sessions, I did quite a bit of work on the Sheppy Brew website.  Most of it was around error-handling.  More often than I would like, the SQL Server that GoDaddy has attached to my site goes down.  Since most of my content is stored in SQL server, the site is pretty much useless when SQL is down.  I added some code to cache most of the pages in text files periodically which can then be accessed when I am unable to access the SQL Server.

I also added an email field to the site comments.  Sometimes (rarely, but it does happen), someone leaves a comment and / or question which I feel needs an answer.  When this happens, I will leave a comment answer, but I usually feel like the person is unlikely to take the time to check back.  The email field gives me the ability to answer this person.  Eventually, I'll probably make the ability to do an email subscription to content updates, and I did some of the work there, but did not fully implement it.

Of course since we were 3 guys alone in the house, we had to throw a party or two.  We invited some hot women.  Of course, none of the women was as hot as my normal woman, but she left us, so what was I to do?

click here to show/hide sexist content (this doesn't work for FB users)

Here are some pictures of us back when my wife wasn't sailing around the world:

I can't wait for Tracy to get home.  I know she doesn't miss me as much as I miss her.  I'm sure she misses the boys, though, so she'll probably come back.  Don't you think?

beer.ericshepard.com

The url http://beer.ericshepard.com is not currently working.  GoDaddy changed my web server, which meant an IP switch.  GoDaddy kindly switched the DNS entry for http://www.sheppybrew.com and the other primary domain names that were pointing to that same web server, but they didn't switch the DNS entries for any sub-domains, which meant I needed to manually switch the IP address of beer.ericshepard.com.  I thought I did switch it.  In fact, I am looking at the DNS manager right now, and it looks to me like beer.ericshepard.com should be pointing to my web server, but browsing to it gives me a not found error and pinging it points to the old IP address.

Of course, this is not really a big deal since anyone can get there by using http://www.sheppybrew.com (plus there are few people who even go to that site) , but there are quite a few old links out on the internet that point to pictures or pages with the address beer.ericshepard.com .  I probably would not have even noticed except I was looking at old posts on this blog about Buckwheat's Belgium Pale Ale and noticed that a picture was missing.  I may have to contact tech support on this one.  Bummer.

Hopefully by the time you read this post, it is taken care of.

Speaking of Buckwheat's Belgium Pale Ale.  Inventory is running low, so I think I'll be brewing another batch soon.  The Beer Model really goes through this beer fast.  You may recall that last time I brewed this, I did a double batch and fermented half with the fermentis S33 yeast (which is my standard yeast for this beer) and some of the T58 yeast (which yields more Belgium flavors).  We agreed that we both enjoy the beer better head-to-head with the S33 yeast.  This time I am going to compare S33 (the reigning champion) with US05.  I am pretty sure that it will be a little more difficult to tell a difference between these two yeasts.  My experience tells me that US05 will probably attenuate more fully with a cleaner ester profile than S33.  If she can tell the difference, my guess is that she'll still prefer S33, but until we do the taste test, there is no way to know for sure.

After this experiment, I have one more yeast I may want to use to challenge the winner.  Many of my beers ferment with a harvested version of American Ale II (Wyeast Labs #1272).  So, far, I've really enjoyed all the beers using the AAII yeast and I sort of consider it my "house yeast".  I have said before that Buckwheat is Phat & Tyred's little brother.  I suspect that if Buckwheat used the same yeast the two beers would be even closer, and maybe extremely difficult to tell apart.  Even if AAII wins, I may not use it in Buckwheat just so the beers are truly significantly different.

Anyway, we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit.  That whole thing is way down the line.

I am running dangerously low on empty bottles.  Anyone have empties they want to drop off? If not, anyone what to help me drink some beer?

Sheppy Brew Web Stats

In my last post (Blog Stats), I mentioned that I discovered interesting stats available for my blog.  GoDaddy, my hosting company for SheppyBrew.com, also offers stats.  So, being the geek that I am I went and looked at those as well.

I am actually hosting a few other sites in the same directory structure, so some of the stats are mixed in with other sites, but Sheppy Brew is by far the most active, so most it dominates most of the stats.

Here are the top 11 pages requested at the Sheppy Brew web site (listed most to least):

• Inventory Page
• Buckwheat's BPA
• Home Page
• Other Beers
• Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale
• Phat & Tyred Amber Ale
• Tommy Hawk APA
• Brewing Calendar
• Tweedle Beetle Imperial Stout
• Blackhawk Black Ale
• Stone Soup IDA

The fact that the inventory page is the most requested is interesting, but probably not too surprising.  It is the page that I go to the most.  The IP address that hits the site the most just happens to be my home IP address, so most likely the pages I go to most often would be high on the list.

And, actually, the list above only includes public facing pages.  I just left off the login page and some of my content management pages, which actually rank pretty high.  This also points out that most of the traffic to sheppybrew.com comes from the Brew Master (me).

It is clear, though, that others do go to the site.  It is hard to say who these people are, but I can tell you some things about my web audience.

The top 3 referring sites are (certainly not surprising):

• http://beer.ericshepard.com/
• http://blog.ericshepard.com/
• http://community.mrbeer.com/

 Then, we get into some a site which I am unfamiliar with (and come up as broken links when I try to go to it)

• http://sfo-userportal.dc.skyfire.com/

And then a mish-mash of random sites, a bunch of which are mostly likely linking to my other sites instead of Sheppy Brew's.

My hosting company (GoDaddy) does not break out the IP address by country, which is a bummer.  I bet I could find references to get that information, but am not going to go through the effort at the moment.

As I mentioned, there are other sites hosted here.  But none of these are even close to as popular as the Sheppy Brew website.  I started hosting beer.ericshepard.com at my hosting account with GoDaddy in 2010, and the yearly report shows activity in 2010 up over 2009 to a factor of 62 (over 6200%).  Specifically, the Sheppy Brew website started with GoDaddy in March of 2010.  Between February and March of 2010, the increase of activity was over 6900%.

Obviously, the Most active year: 2010.
Most active quarter: Q2 2010
Most active month: March 2010
Most active week beginning: March 7 2010
Most active day: March 4, 2010
Most active hour: Feb 23, 2006 07:00 - 07:59 (Interesting since this was before Sheppy Brew existed and certainly well before it started being hosted here.)

Days of the week are pretty evenly distributed, but Thursday has a 10% lead over 2nd place Friday and a 33% lead over last place Sunday. 

The most active hour of the day is 2 - 2:59 AM.  It is closely followed by 12 - 12:59 AM and then 9 - 9:59 PM and then 11 - 11:59 PM.  "After hours (5pm - 7:59AM)" are about twice as active as "Work Hours (8AM - 4:59PM)"

The Mozilla browser is about 3 times more popular in accessing my sites than 2nd place MS Internet Explorer.

Windows Operating Systems clearly dominate when it comes to what was used to access my web sites.

Ok, well, I'm quite certain that very few of my blog readers care at all about this.  I did find it interesting to go through and see all this information, but it certainly is not that useful to me.  Yep, I'm a geek.

Blog Stats

Today, I noticed a new tab in the BlogSpot Dashboard.  Well, to be honest, I don't know how new it is.  I've never noticed it before, but it certainly may have been there for quite awhile without me noticing it.  The "new" tab is called Stats and lists different statistics on people accessing my blog.

There are some interesting (and in some cases surprising) facts that the stats show me.

For example, in the past month (Nov 7 - Dec 6), my top 10 viewed blog entries (listed most hits to least) are:

• Poison Rationality (Oct 9, 2008)
• Beer Bloggers (Nov 19, 2010)
• Tweedle Beetles (Mar 2, 2006)
• GABF Final Session and Random Thoughts (Sep 20, 2010)
• Fizzy Yellow Beer (Nov 12, 2010)
• Happy Reformation (Oct 29, 2008)
• An Idle Thought (Nov 24, 2010)
• Roctoberfest Lager (Aug 21, 2010)
• Zoo Zoo Zoo (Nov 6, 2010)
• QLC All Grain Brew (Oct 11, 2010)

Some of these are recent posts, so they make perfect sense.  But some of these completely surprise me ( Poison Rationality being #1; Tweedle Beetles being #3; Happy Reformation being #6).  I am not sure who is out there reading these.  No one is (or very few people are) leaving comments.

The other interesting thing I found is the countries that are accessing the blog over the past month. Top 10 in order of most to least:

• United States (this one makes sense)
• Netherlands
• Russia
• Germany
• Ukraine
• Latvia
• Portugal
• Slovenia
• France
• Brazil

I had no idea, my blog had such an international audience.  I wish more would leave comments.

Anyway, there is other interesting stuff in there.  I'm sure no one really cares except me, but I thought I'd share this anyway.

Oh ... and by the way ... I just added "Ad Sense" to my blog.  The fact that so many people are actually hitting my blog makes me think I might as well see what will happen.   The ad is now between "previous posts" and "blogs I read" on the right hand side of the blog.  Go ahead and click on one or two if you don't mind.  Thanks.  (those who read this as a facebook note will not have any idea what that means.  Go to http://blog.ericshepard.com and you will.

SheppyBrew.com

GoDaddy has been sending me warnings that most of my domains were "about" to expire.  GoDaddy starts sending out the notifications ridiculously far in advance (90 days?) and I finally got sick of all the emails and renewed my domains.  At the same time, I registered sheppybrew.com.  You might call it an impulse buy, although it is something I've been thinking about for several months.

So, now if you want to read up on Sheppy Brew's beers, not only can you go to http://beer.ericshepard.com, but now you can go to http://www.sheppybrew.com.  Personally, I'll be getting there through the new sheppybrew.com domain name.  Google has not indexed sheppybrew.com, yet, so my search page still hits beer.ericshepard.com.  I'm sure I'll be able to update that soon.

I set up forwarding to the "brewing" labeled entries of this blog at http://blog.sheppybrew.com, so if you want to read about beer on my blog, but not all the other boring minutia of my life, you can bookmark that url (right ... like anyone would want to come back here more than once). 

Thank you to the Beer Snob Chick who just recently gave me a suggestion on where to buy New Belgium's 2010 La Folie.  You may remember (but most likely you don't) that La Folie was one of the great sour beers that I tried this year at GABF (that stands for Great American Beer Festival for my step-cousin-in-law). As of the time I am writing this, I have not headed up to 14th and Krameria, yet.  I hope they still have some when I arrive.

The hazelnut chocolate Bluefield Ale

This weekend, the Beer Model and I shared a Bluefield Chocolate Ale.  Part of me was dreading the experience, but it did not suck at all.  In fact, I think it makes a very nice dessert beer.  It will make an awesome beer float at some point.  It is very chocolaty and has a very nice hazelnut flavor to it as well.  Even Tyler said it smelled like cocoa, so I guess the aroma doesn't have any of that disgusting beer smell (disgusting for my kids and sister ... or at least my I hope my sister doesn't think it smells or tastes disgusting).  Since I like it and the beer model likes it, chances are my sister will not like it, but hey, we can't please everyone, now can we? Now, I just have to figure out a good way to get some to either Wisconsin or Michigan, so Mrs. Bluefield can give it a try.

The beer model thought Bluefield Chocolate Ale was good.

The kids didn't think it smelled disgusting

I had been planning on cracking open my second taste of Fox Sox Knox Rye Pale Ale sometime this weekend, but never got around to it.  I had my first taste Thursday night.  It is a wonderfully hoppy beer.  The color is a beautiful gold that is not quite like any of my other beers.  It is very similar in taste to Tommy Hawk APA, and I might have to do a side-by-side comparison to decide how close they actually are.

We played up in the mountains by Mt. Evans this Saturday, and stopped by Tommy Knocker brew pub for lunch.   I got to use my AHA membership card to get the pub discount.  This is the first place that I've pulled out the card and had the person actually know what I was talking about.  The beer model and I each got a free pint (I think the deal there is a free pint with an entree ... which is a pretty good deal).  Lunch was nice.  My Hop Strike Black Rye IPA was excellent.  Tracy liked her Jack Whacker Wheat Ale as well.

As always, if you are reading this on facebook, it really looks nicer on my blog:  http://blog.ericshepard.com/2010/12/sheppybrewcom.html.

Powerless

The power just went off to the house while I was on the computer.
A couple months ago, the power went off in our house right before my wife needed to make a conference call for work.  Must have been a snow day or something.  She had a heck of a time finding the right number to call since it was in her email and the computer was off.  Eventually she figured it out without missing much of the call.  Not a huge deal, but it certainly was not an ideal situation. 

After that experience, I went out and got a battery backup for our computer and cable modem.  So, now I am able to keep working while the power is out.  I am pretty sure this is the first time we have tested the battery backup.  Good news ... apparently I got everything plugged into the right spots!

I tried some mead last night.  It was horrible.  Yes, I brewed it.  I do not know if I am just not a fan of mead, or if I just screwed it up.  My guess was a combination of the two.  Oh well, I wasn't expecting much out of it, anyway.

Well, I will shut down the computer now.  I am not sure how much life the battery has in it.

Fort

Ok ... Computer geek here again. Now I am trying a smaller resolution photo.

In case you are wondering, this picture is a fort my boys made in the living room while I was down trying to get my wife's Garmin updated with a 2010 map and my wife was at Target. Someone really should keep an eye on them. Maybe we need a nanny.

Ok ... Lets see what this one does.


---

Hmm... this one worked out just fine. Really not sure what happened before. Maybe it was a blogspot issue with the size of the first email. Although if that were the case, the forwarded email should not have been any better.

FW: Happy Zoo Year

Playing with the new phone. Note the huge photo below. Go ahead ... just click on it.

The first time I sent this from the phone, blogspot only got part of the message and did not include the picture. I figured this was a phone setting issue. Then, I forwarded it again and got the whole thing.... including this HUGE nice resolution photo. I need to ask my phone to reduce the resolution for these images if I am going to be emailing them like this.

Now, I'm not sure what the issue was before. I'll have to keep playing with the phone and blogging with it I guess.

---

From: Eric Shepard <eric@sheppytect.com>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 2:43 PM
To: Esheppy BlogSpot <esheppy.jeremy@blogger.com>
Subject: Happy Zoo Year

Did you realize that we just had a rare new years eve blue moon? Well we did.

I just got a new smart phone. I have been wanting a new one for for some time, and verizon was willing to sell me one for about $25, so I went ahead and got a new one. It is nice and new. Mostly the functionality is about the same, but it is nice to have a battery that lasts more than a few hours.

We are at the zoo today. It is a good day to be at the zoo. The animals seem to be more active and available on cool days than they are in the hot of summer. Plus there were not very people here today crowding us.

Anyway, I am just making sure I can still phone blog.

Happy zoo year!