Coffeeshop Menus

[Lemming]

It is obviously amazing & important to have the archive of old menus and record of old shops that have been lost, and the locations that are outright closed are almost all noted as (closed), but there are a lot of entries too for places that are still open either with other names or even as bars that aren't really marked as such until viewing the page.

I've just done a small upgrade to FBN's site. Most of the changes will be invisible because they were just more tidying up and simplifying behind the scenes. I did make a couple of small cosmetic changes, though, and added a quick and dirty change to achieve what you asked for. A shop can now be shown as:

(now a bar) - based on its current type in the ACD database.
(old name) - based on the presence of a later name in the FBN database.
(closed) - from ACD data.

I haven't checked the results against your list but it should've caught them all.
It won't pick up a shop that has changed name but not been reflected on FBN yet, if there are any such places.

[Lemming]

Right, some more developments on this.

I've created a new index covering both ACD and FBN with filters.

By default, it lists all of the shops in the ACD with the matching pages on FBN where available. There are then three filter buttons at the top to dramatically reduce the length of the list. Hopefully these are self-explanatory but the best bet it to try them to see what the various combinations do.

The list is divided by town and that leads to an annoying feature whereby, if you filter out all of the shops in a town, the name of that town still appears. I might try to fix that with some better code or just put each town on its own page.

Here's the prototype: ACD/FBN Combined Index

Please let me know whether this makes sense.

[Lemming]

p.s. regarding the changes to the main FBN index, I have spotted one shop that has changed name twice since the last menu was submitted. What is now Best Friends Oud-Zuid and previously Basjoe 2, hasn't featured on FBN since it was 't Gierenest, quite a few years ago!

[AzLaker]

Please let me know whether this makes sense.

Yes, it makes sense to me. Thanks again Lemming.

AzLaker

[Not_the_monk]

I've just done a small upgrade to FBN's site. Most of the changes will be invisible because they were just more tidying up and simplifying behind the scenes. I did make a couple of small cosmetic changes, though, and added a quick and dirty change to achieve what you asked for. A shop can now be shown as:

(now a bar) - based on its current type in the ACD database.
(old name) - based on the presence of a later name in the FBN database.
(closed) - from ACD data.

I haven't checked the results against your list but it should've caught them all.
It won't pick up a shop that has changed name but not been reflected on FBN yet, if there are any such places.

Excellent, these are really good additions imho, just been going through the site and that totally works, thank you!

Right, some more developments on this.

I've created a new index covering both ACD and FBN with filters.

By default, it lists all of the shops in the ACD with the matching pages on FBN where available. There are then three filter buttons at the top to dramatically reduce the length of the list. Hopefully these are self-explanatory but the best bet it to try them to see what the various combinations do.

The list is divided by town and that leads to an annoying feature whereby, if you filter out all of the shops in a town, the name of that town still appears. I might try to fix that with some better code or just put each town on its own page.

Here's the prototype: ACD/FBN Combined Index

Please let me know whether this makes sense.

Makes complete sense, that's a really interesting way to look at them side by side. I like it a lot. I guess there's a few oddities, like I can't imagine genuinely there's been so many Kadinsky submissions but all for the 1 branch, but yeah, that's some nice work again!!

[Lemming]

@Not_the_monk - Glad the new features are working for you.

Regarding chains like Kadinsky, there is some history involved. FBN often grouped all menus for chains like Greenhouse and Plug on one page. Sometimes there were captions indicating the specific branch but not always. Furthermore, contributors often don't specify which branch they took the picture in. It's worth noting that when I started the review pages on these forums I also grouped some chain shops together, something I later came to regret.

Where possible, I've restructured FBN's site by creating separate pages for chain shops but it's not always clear. Kadinsky is a particular problem because I suspect visitors to the shops may not even know which branch they're in or what to call it.

In many cases, chains have the same menu with the same prices in all of their branches whereas others vary. For instance, Plug West is considerably cheaper than the other two Plug branches so it's nice to separate them where possible.

[Not_the_monk]

Ah of course, that makes total sense. Yeah I thought it would be something like that with the likes of Kadinsky (where the menus are all the same anyway as far as I can remember). I'm never quite sure which one is which myself when on the ground

Definitely its much more valuable to have the chain shops separated where there's generally variation, in strains and in prices, between branches.

[Not_the_monk]

Love the amount of logos getting added

[Lemming]

Glad you like.

FBN had logos for some shops and graphic text for the rest. I've never figured out how he made the graphic text so, whenever I've added new shops, I've used logos.

More recently, I had a bit of fun setting up logos for more shops to replace the graphic text. I've now started doing all of the shops in the top 18. That may continue if I have time.

Incidentally, you may need to reload (shift-F5 on PC or clear history on phone) to see all of the latest versions and tweaks.

[Lemming]

Another sneak preview for forum readers. This is the beginnings of an index by town.

Towns and Cities

[Ghost]

Another sneak preview for forum readers. This is the beginnings of an index by town.

Towns and Cities

I really like it @Lemming very easy to use and navigate, it is a from me

[Lemming]

Love the amount of logos getting added

Well, this mission aroused my obsession with collecting things so I've been manically adding logos to the menus site. I think I've now done all of the relatively easy ones. If anyone knows of anything for the missing ones, please let me know.

In other news, I've had to mark a couple more shops as closed on both sites but also added at least one brand new one - Smokery in Wormerveer (near Zaandam). This is another member of the Plug chain.

Splif 1 in Beverwijk has been taken over by Super Fly of Hoofddorp.

[Not_the_monk]

Well, this mission aroused my obsession with collecting things so I've been manically adding logos to the menus site. I think I've now done all of the relatively easy ones. If anyone knows of anything for the missing ones, please let me know.

Had noticed you've really kicked on with adding sooo many, looks great!

[Lemming]

Lots more changes behind the scenes.

I've moved FBN's site to the same server as the ACD and redirected the coffeeshopmenus.org domain name to there. This will save money and make maintenance a little simpler. It's possible to do this because the hosting deal supports up to two domains.

My first attempt at this blew everything up! When I first signed up they were offering unlimited space so I copied all of FBN's material onto the server. I hadn't noticed that they'd change the terms to remove the limit on inodes (which I hadn't noticed and might also have fallen foul of) and imposed a limit of 10GB of total space. FBN's server had loads of stuff on it including large video files and suchlike so I blew the limit and took the ACD down for a couple of hours before I realised and contacted the hosting company.

Another potential issue is bandwidth. There is no limit on this at the moment but they might feel we're taking the piss a little. The menus site was getting over a million hits every day! That translated into about 1TB of bandwidth every 3 days or so. The problem was that if you open the page for, say, Plug Utopia, while you're looking at the most recent menu, your browser was downloading all 135 older menus. Many of these are quite large files. In practice you probably won't actually look at the older ones so that's a bit of a waste of site bandwidth and data on your phone.

I've worked around this by splitting the pages into a front page with just the latest menu and an archive page with the rest on. That way you only download the older menus if you're interested.

In future I might look at a more sophisticated solution whereby pages get longer as you scroll down, Facebook-style, if I can figure out how to do that.

Anyway, the rate of new menus coming in seems to still be accelerating so that's good.

As ever, any thoughts, suggestions, complaints or whatever always welcome.

[Lemming]

If you're interested in the jargon I mentioned.

'Hits' refers to the total number of requests to the server, so that will be web pages and graphics such as menus, logos, icons on buttons and so on.

'Bandwidth' means the total size of all of the files downloaded, much like the 'data' measurement on your phone.

'Pages' means the index page, individual coffeeshop pages and so on.

'Visits' means people visiting the site.

So, for coffeeshopmenus, there are usually over 5,000 visits per day (5,471 yesterday) and they look at over 20,000 pages per day between them. Before I restructured the pages, that was leading to well over one million hits per day. That in turn was consuming nearly 400GB of bandwidth daily.

That has now reduced to around 0.7 million hits and a little over 100GB of bandwidth for the same number of visits and pages viewed.

For comparison, the ACD (including these forums) currently gets over 3,000 visits per day (so fewer than the menus site, although it reached a peak of around 8,000 in its heyday). They view slightly more pages per visit than menus viewers so over 20,000 pages per day (around the same as the menus site). That only adds up to about 80,000 hits and usually less than 1GB of bandwidth because ACD doesn't have so many large pictures.