About TastyBrew.com
Tastybrew.com was designed to be a user driven website for the homebrewing community. Tastybrew.com is relatively new to the internet, but plans to continually grow and hopes it is a useful and enjoyable resource for the homebrewer. Do you have a suggestion? Send it to us via the Contact Us page.
TastyBrew.com is served from a server named Saaz, which is an AMD K6-2 450 powered server, with 512 MB DIMM RAM. We are co-located in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Our bandwidth provider is Willamette.net (like the hop!), the largest internet wholesaler in the Pacific Northwest.
TastyBrew.com has chosen open source alternatives to provide for their software needs. Not only is open sourced software usually free, it is also usually more robust and stable, thus providing the most 'up time' to our users. For more information about open source technologies, visit http://www.opensource.org.
Rob Hudson
Rob first conceived of creating Tastybrew.com when he was talking with a friend about brewing beer and the words "making a tasty brew" rolled off of his tongue. Once hearing those words together, he knew he found a good name for a brewing website. In 2000, Tastybrew.com had it's first humble beginnings.
Initially starting out focusing on a recipe database, it was soon discovered that recipes weren't the only thing needed to make a tasty brew. So Rob set out to also create an online community where homebrewers could help each other with the details, science, and art of homebrewing.
Rob is a web application developer by profession, and administers and programs for Tastybrew.com in his spare time. If you have feedback on the site, please send them from our contact page.
Colony Krecklow
Thanks go out to Colony for helping create the Tastybrew.com logo.
Matt Jarvis
Thanks to Matt of BrewDomain for being a constant resource and beta tester of new features of Tastybrew.com. (And for getting me into all-grain brewing.)
Denny Conn
Thanks to Denny Conn for beta testing new features, offering advice, and his excellent knowledge base and tirelessly responding to questions.
Operating System: FreeBSD
The operating system of our server is FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a free, open source, advanced operating system for Intel ia32 compatible, DEC Alpha, and PC-98 architectures. It is derived from BSD UNIX, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals.
FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.
Web Server: Apache
"The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server."
Since its inception in 1995, Apache has become the worlds most popular web server, used on more than 3,000,000 web sites - more than every other web server combined. (Source: Netcraft)
Scripting Language: PHP
TastyBrew.com is a highly dynamic site, with constantly changing layout and content. PHP integrates tightly with the Apache web server to provide a means of embedding complex scripting directly into the HTML pages that are served to your browser. One of PHPs many strengths is its strong database support. TastyBrew.com takes advantage of PHPs persistant database connections to a MySQL server to retrieve and deliver content on demand.
Relational Database: MySQL
MySQL is a very high performance, multi-threaded SQL database server which is capable of reliably handling large amounts of data. These qualities make it ideal for use in a Web environment.
Graphics: GIMP
The few graphics found on the TastyBrew.com site were created or edited using The Gimp (the GNU Image Manipulation Program); a powerful freely available graphics editor which runs under Linux and Unix.