TL;DR - I'm Aaron, I'm building a Juice Database & Review Site. Would love for you to poke around and let me know what you think about it and if there's any way to make it more useful!
-------------
Greetings ECF! My name's Aaron and I'm a relatively new vaper (2 months now). It's been a crazy experience joining the vaping community, with so much information and various setups to learn about. I am merely an apprentice in the vaping world, and would love to know what those more experienced than me think of my new project.
(Thanks to the moderators here for reviewing and allowing me to talk about this project!)
I am a web developer that has a tendency to build websites based on the needs I see involving things I'm interested in. I have a bunch of other site's I've build, but my last project was a tool to help Diablo 3 players build the best character they can.
The idea came from a problem I ran into; When I first started vaping, I ordered like 15 bottles of juice in the first few weeks... didn't like very many of them, and really had no idea what I actually enjoyed. With all this juice, I felt like I had to write down what I thought of all of them!
Spreadsheet? Nah.
I thought about it for a few days, and decided to put the time into it to build a full blown prototype of a web application. Someplace to review the juices you like, keep track of them, and share what you do and don't like with your friends (and the community as a whole).
JuiceDB.com was born.
I'm about a month into development, but let me tell you a little about the site and what my ideals and goals are. To start with, these are values I hold to all sites I build and all communities I want to help improve.
Pretty generic, but these are important things. The site's free to use and will stay that way, and I don't want to sell you anything. I'd like to provide a service to the community that will give value and insight into what others are thinking!
Now that I've already written a massive wall of text on philosophy and history, onto the interesting parts, and more about the website itself!
What is JuiceDB?
JuiceDB is a crowd-sourced ranking and review engine, build on a custom developed platform. It's designed to help share information about the products you've tried in the ecig/nv/pv market outside of the vendor's website. No one's going to delete your review here (though it might get downvoted!).
I'm building it in my spare time, some nights and weekends. This isn't my day job, I do this kind of thing because I find benefit in it and I really enjoy building things. I went from lego's and building castles to programming and building web applications.
So, what does the site do for you? I'm going to break these out into little sections and explain them a bit. Hopefully they make sense! Sometimes as a developer, you make too many assumptions about how users are going to use your site
Keep track of your opinions on the Juices and Vendors you've tried
You get your own "Dashboard" as a user, which tracks all the data you've entered on the site. You can review anything in the database, edit them, and even remove your reviews. Manage your favorites or your wishlist, and easily edit any and all non-personal information about you. Your dashboard is the center of your universe as a user and is there to help organize you.
The main part of this is reviewing things that are in the database! While reviewing a Juice or a Vendor, you're prompted for a ton of information. The only things required however are the "Flavors", the "Rating" (1-10), and a small written review. More advanced information can also be associated to the review, and even more advanced user settings are on the way
These reviews should be thoughtful, explain yourself. No "this is garbage" or "Worse flavor ever". That stuff doesn't help anyone determine if -they- might like it. As I mentioned in another thread, I'm not a fan of the anise flavor, but I write this out in my reviews to explain why I don't like a specific juice. I'm planning on writing a huge guide on "good reviews" sometime in the future.
Provide a "Profile" for you to share your favorites with others
I have only been vaping for about 2 months, but I've already converted about 3 people to vaping off analogs. The most common things I'm getting is "What should I buy?" and "What juices are good?". For hardware, I don't have a great answer just yet, but for juices, I just send them to my JuiceDB Profile Page:
http://juicedb.com/users/jesta
You'll also notice my forum signature at the bottom of this post. It's dynamically generated based on what I've entered into the database.
The goal here is to provide a place for not only you to keep track of your opinions, but share them with others. It's a lot easier for me to send my friends a link to JuiceDB than it is for me to write an email or create a spreadsheet.
Incorporate data from other websites (youtube, reddit) about things in the database
I don't want JuiceDB to be the "only" source for information on the internet. Communities (just like ECF) provide tremendous value, which is why I'm creating a system that can read outside sources of information. It's a system of links, not the actual content, as I don't want to devalue any other community out there.
On every Juice and Vendor in the database, there's an "External" tab that contains links to Youtube and Reddit. All these posts are scanned, then approved (by moderators) if they are actually related to what you're viewing. These are the only two sources currently, but I plan on reaching out to many other sources of information to create a "hub" of information that will let you travel to many other websites.
Rank the Juices and Vendors on a page to find highly recommended products
If you click "Juices" or "Vendors" in the top, you'll come to the "Top Rated" page for that type. These pages are designed to provide you a quick overview of tons of Juices or Vendors. They're ranked by the average ratings provided by all users in the database. A juice or vendor is only ranked after a specified number of users provide feedback.
There's also a few other views for this information:
You can also filter the juices by "flavor" on any of these. Want to see the newest Tobacco or the top rated Sweet flavor? Just pick it from the dropdown.
The ability to see what others have thought about a specific Juice or Vendor
When you visit a juice or vendor page, you'll find a bunch of statistics, charts and reviews from everyone who's had an experience with the product. The comments are sorted by how well "rated" they are (by other users) and you can see breakdowns of all the different stats associated to it.
Here's where you'll find:
On the Juice page, it also does a quick scan to find "similar" flavors in the database as things you might like. It's relatively simplistic still, but you might stumble on something you'd enjoy!
Other features
I have a few other parts of the site, but they're more "meta" than what's listed above. I've setup a forum to communicate with moderators and collect feedback, and a blog setup to share the most recent patch notes. There's the standard twitter and facebook pages for you to follow along and receive updates and a homepage to see what's happening.
All and all, I'm pretty happy with how the site's turning out, and I hope you find value in it. I've got some grandiose ideas in the works, which I'm hoping to have done in the next week or so. But the most important thing now is you.
I'd love to know what you think...
Do you see a problem with how somethings being done? Is there something missing you'd like to see added? Find a page that crashes or something's not working?
That's why I'm here. I want to build a resource the community appreciates and enjoys. With my last project, the community really helped me mold everything and guided it to what it is today. I want the same thing out of that project, and during the process am hoping to make some friends and help a few people out!
Just like I said about reviews, I want the good and the bad
Edit: I'll also state that it's not working that well in older versions of IE. I haven't taken the time to optimize the site for older tech. I'd recommend a fresh version of Chrome, Safari or Firefox for the best experience!
-------------
Greetings ECF! My name's Aaron and I'm a relatively new vaper (2 months now). It's been a crazy experience joining the vaping community, with so much information and various setups to learn about. I am merely an apprentice in the vaping world, and would love to know what those more experienced than me think of my new project.
(Thanks to the moderators here for reviewing and allowing me to talk about this project!)
I am a web developer that has a tendency to build websites based on the needs I see involving things I'm interested in. I have a bunch of other site's I've build, but my last project was a tool to help Diablo 3 players build the best character they can.
The idea came from a problem I ran into; When I first started vaping, I ordered like 15 bottles of juice in the first few weeks... didn't like very many of them, and really had no idea what I actually enjoyed. With all this juice, I felt like I had to write down what I thought of all of them!
Spreadsheet? Nah.
I thought about it for a few days, and decided to put the time into it to build a full blown prototype of a web application. Someplace to review the juices you like, keep track of them, and share what you do and don't like with your friends (and the community as a whole).
JuiceDB.com was born.
I'm about a month into development, but let me tell you a little about the site and what my ideals and goals are. To start with, these are values I hold to all sites I build and all communities I want to help improve.
- Your data is sacred and so are you. I don't need anything from you besides a username and a password. If you don't want to give me your email, don't, but I can't send you password reset emails. That's the only reason it's even on the form
- I want to provide transparency. The reviews you write have a full history of edits, will be linked to your other reviews and other users can upvote or downvote it. It's a lot easier to spot a shill or placed review if they're giving all 10's to a specific vendor.
- I want it to be useful and your voice to be heard. I don't want to clutter the page with 10 ads and only show glowing happy reviews. I want the negative, I want constructive, and I want opinionated reviews. The more, the better!
Pretty generic, but these are important things. The site's free to use and will stay that way, and I don't want to sell you anything. I'd like to provide a service to the community that will give value and insight into what others are thinking!
Now that I've already written a massive wall of text on philosophy and history, onto the interesting parts, and more about the website itself!
What is JuiceDB?
JuiceDB is a crowd-sourced ranking and review engine, build on a custom developed platform. It's designed to help share information about the products you've tried in the ecig/nv/pv market outside of the vendor's website. No one's going to delete your review here (though it might get downvoted!).
I'm building it in my spare time, some nights and weekends. This isn't my day job, I do this kind of thing because I find benefit in it and I really enjoy building things. I went from lego's and building castles to programming and building web applications.
So, what does the site do for you? I'm going to break these out into little sections and explain them a bit. Hopefully they make sense! Sometimes as a developer, you make too many assumptions about how users are going to use your site
Keep track of your opinions on the Juices and Vendors you've tried
You get your own "Dashboard" as a user, which tracks all the data you've entered on the site. You can review anything in the database, edit them, and even remove your reviews. Manage your favorites or your wishlist, and easily edit any and all non-personal information about you. Your dashboard is the center of your universe as a user and is there to help organize you.
The main part of this is reviewing things that are in the database! While reviewing a Juice or a Vendor, you're prompted for a ton of information. The only things required however are the "Flavors", the "Rating" (1-10), and a small written review. More advanced information can also be associated to the review, and even more advanced user settings are on the way
These reviews should be thoughtful, explain yourself. No "this is garbage" or "Worse flavor ever". That stuff doesn't help anyone determine if -they- might like it. As I mentioned in another thread, I'm not a fan of the anise flavor, but I write this out in my reviews to explain why I don't like a specific juice. I'm planning on writing a huge guide on "good reviews" sometime in the future.
Provide a "Profile" for you to share your favorites with others
I have only been vaping for about 2 months, but I've already converted about 3 people to vaping off analogs. The most common things I'm getting is "What should I buy?" and "What juices are good?". For hardware, I don't have a great answer just yet, but for juices, I just send them to my JuiceDB Profile Page:
http://juicedb.com/users/jesta
You'll also notice my forum signature at the bottom of this post. It's dynamically generated based on what I've entered into the database.
The goal here is to provide a place for not only you to keep track of your opinions, but share them with others. It's a lot easier for me to send my friends a link to JuiceDB than it is for me to write an email or create a spreadsheet.
Incorporate data from other websites (youtube, reddit) about things in the database
I don't want JuiceDB to be the "only" source for information on the internet. Communities (just like ECF) provide tremendous value, which is why I'm creating a system that can read outside sources of information. It's a system of links, not the actual content, as I don't want to devalue any other community out there.
On every Juice and Vendor in the database, there's an "External" tab that contains links to Youtube and Reddit. All these posts are scanned, then approved (by moderators) if they are actually related to what you're viewing. These are the only two sources currently, but I plan on reaching out to many other sources of information to create a "hub" of information that will let you travel to many other websites.
Rank the Juices and Vendors on a page to find highly recommended products
If you click "Juices" or "Vendors" in the top, you'll come to the "Top Rated" page for that type. These pages are designed to provide you a quick overview of tons of Juices or Vendors. They're ranked by the average ratings provided by all users in the database. A juice or vendor is only ranked after a specified number of users provide feedback.
There's also a few other views for this information:
- Most Discussed: The most discussion happened on these entries.
- Newest: The newest entries in the database.
- All: Everything, sortable by first letter and searchable.
You can also filter the juices by "flavor" on any of these. Want to see the newest Tobacco or the top rated Sweet flavor? Just pick it from the dropdown.
The ability to see what others have thought about a specific Juice or Vendor
When you visit a juice or vendor page, you'll find a bunch of statistics, charts and reviews from everyone who's had an experience with the product. The comments are sorted by how well "rated" they are (by other users) and you can see breakdowns of all the different stats associated to it.
Here's where you'll find:
- Reviews by other users
- Ratings by other users
- Videos from Youtube about this
- External Links to other websites about this
On the Juice page, it also does a quick scan to find "similar" flavors in the database as things you might like. It's relatively simplistic still, but you might stumble on something you'd enjoy!
Other features
I have a few other parts of the site, but they're more "meta" than what's listed above. I've setup a forum to communicate with moderators and collect feedback, and a blog setup to share the most recent patch notes. There's the standard twitter and facebook pages for you to follow along and receive updates and a homepage to see what's happening.
All and all, I'm pretty happy with how the site's turning out, and I hope you find value in it. I've got some grandiose ideas in the works, which I'm hoping to have done in the next week or so. But the most important thing now is you.
I'd love to know what you think...
Do you see a problem with how somethings being done? Is there something missing you'd like to see added? Find a page that crashes or something's not working?
That's why I'm here. I want to build a resource the community appreciates and enjoys. With my last project, the community really helped me mold everything and guided it to what it is today. I want the same thing out of that project, and during the process am hoping to make some friends and help a few people out!
Just like I said about reviews, I want the good and the bad
Edit: I'll also state that it's not working that well in older versions of IE. I haven't taken the time to optimize the site for older tech. I'd recommend a fresh version of Chrome, Safari or Firefox for the best experience!
Last edited:
