Icelab

Decaf Sucks, our coffee and café review web site, recently turned 1 year old. For a site created over a single weekend for Rails Rumble, Decaf Sucks has been a great success. Over the last year, 143 different contributing reviewers have written 610 reviews for 502 cafés in 18 different countries. Outstanding!

Here’s how we’ve travelled over time. The blue line is our cumulative review count, and the red is the number added each day.

The site has worked amazingly well in its first incarnation. However, with the number of reviews growing, it has become time to make some changes. So, as a first birthday celebration, we recently pushed up a whole swag of improvements to the site. Here is the lowdown:

• New design: Wider and shinier, the new design puts more information in front of you without sacrificing cleanliness.
• Infinite scroll: No more pagination! Scroll to the bottom of a café or review list, and another set of reviews will appear for you.
• Reviews grouped by cafe: We’re starting to see 3 or 4 reviews for popular cafés, so it’s time to organise things better. Now we group together all the reviews for a cafe and present that cafe to you with the average rating across all its reviews. This reduces the clutter and gives you a better idea of which cafes are truly good and bad. It also makes the map of nearby cafes far more useful - no more duplicate entries!
• Facebook logins: This should help a much wider group of people share their experiences.
• People pages: Meet our reviewers and follow their cafe adventures via convenient ATOM feed.
• Performance improvements: We’ve started minifying and bundling all our CSS and JavaScript, which should help with performance particularly on the iPhone. We’ve also eliminated a bunch of jQuery plugins by using the Google Maps API directly.

Go check it out and leave a review!