HadCoffee Blog

Coded a basic cafe banner image handler today.

• Resizes to 2000px and 1000px variations
• Creates WebP version for supporting browsers
• Had to use GD for that, my install of Imagick didn’t have WebP support
• File upload is sync, but resizing and cloud upload is Queued job so user doesn’t wait
• Uploads to S3 and cleans up old file versions

The code that renders the image on the frontend cafe page is suuuper rough. Just gets a random size, rather than using srcset. Sniffs webp support and does cloud disk access right in the view. Definitely needs tidying up, still a good start though.

Sourcing 2000px images (wide on retina) might be difficult. A lot of photos on the web seem to be lower quality. Might have to ask users or cafes to submit a quality one!

I made a nice chunk of progress on the ‘To Try’ feature of HadCoffee this weekend. This lets you bookmark cafés you’ve heard of and would like to try later. By default the list on HadCoffee will sort by proximity using your current location.

Most of the recent work for this feature was on some nice-to-use buttons for toggling a cafe in your Favourites or To Try list. I had mostly built the ‘Fav star’ earlier, but improved it with a visual :focus indicator for keyboard accessibility.

See the Pen SVG Favourite by Mike (@mike_hasarms) on CodePen.0

The coffee cup icons are SVG based Vue components that receive rating data from the page and fill the cup appropriately.

I also worked on some basic animation of the button to add a cafe to the To Try list to make the transition to the active state a bit more obvious. I think little touches of movement make the thing more engaging to use as well.

Accessibility

I spent a bit of time improving the A11Y of these (and other features). The Vue SVG components are keyboard accessible, labelled and indicate focus. I am planning to do a more thorough A11Y test before I release, but I’m certainly not leaving all of those concerns until the end of development.

Anonymous Users

Currently the Favourites and To Try lists require a user to be logged in. I had planned to allow anonymous users to begin keeping these lists for themselves in localStorage. The idea was to lower the barrier to entry to using the site. It does however add development complexity as the app needs to be able to use both local and server storage for those lists and load in data in different ways.

As this is a mostly server-rendered app all the initial page data is sent down with the page load, and populated into the Vue components. Supporting anon users will require separate logic to request their cafe data from an API endpoint.

That’s not hugely difficult, it’s just another thing to be done before launch.

I’m keen to make some solid progress on HadCoffee over the Christmas period to hopefully get to an early 2019 v1 launch. This week I was working on the main coffee rating interface which depends on users being able to select or enter the café they visited.

I’ll add the autocomplete lookups for typed cafe names, but I also wanted some basic quick suggestions based on where the user has been before and their current location.

This would save typing for common places and maybe also hint at other nearby cafés the user mightn’t know about.

The frontend part of these feature went pretty smoothly. The Vue component watches for the users location (HTML5 Geolocation) and calls the backend to load these quick suggestions as it’s known. There’s a little debounce action to slow things down as the geolocation API can return updated positions in quick succession as it locks on a more accurate location.

Geographic Search by Proximity

The smooth progress I was making through this feature hit a wall when it came to actually querying cafés by distance though. I was hoping to use MySQL’s ST_Distance_sphere function to let the DB do that work. I’m running MariaDB though, which although it’s advertised as a ‘drop in’ replacement for MySQL does not support this feature ????

I prefer a simpler dev environment (I’m not using Laravel Valet or Docker images) so I didn’t feel like swapping to MySQL for this project. Changing my workflow to use Valet also wasn’t very appealing when I’m otherwise happy with the setup. so I briefly tried migrating to Postgres. I know it’s a great DB, but I haven’t used it before and that’s a big change to have to make to run one type of query.

In the end I’m going with a raw SQL query to help with this. I’ll add a simple bounding box to its parameters first to avoid having to do a table scan of every cafe in the world (once my DB gets to that point ????)

Although it took a windy path this geo search will also provide the basis for the other cafe search features on the site such as the autocomplete (to improve relevance) and the location based search.

$query  = "SELECT id, cafe_id, lat, lng, address, locality, city,
        ( 6371 * acos( cos( radians(:lat) ) * cos( radians( lat ) ) 
        * cos( radians( lng ) - radians(:lng) ) + sin( radians(:lat2) ) * sin(radians(lat)) ) ) AS distance 
        FROM cafe_locations ";

This is a good step towards being able to add café & coffee reviews, however the next big sticking point will be letting users add new cafés as they go.

Ideally I’d like to collect a bit of meta data such as roasters, menu and seating options to help users finding cafés, but I’ll have to see how much data entry users will tolerate. I also need to be aware of how or if I can verify this community sourced data.