So, I've got a sort of side project. For those who don't know, in the state of Washington, the distribution and sale of hard liquor is pretty much a state monopoly. Its expensive, there's not a great selection, and the stores frequently have reasonable, but not necessarily great hours. One of the benefits of this, though, is that the
Washington Liquor Board has searchable lists of liquor types, where they can be found and how much it costs. Theoretically it also tells you how much a store has on hand, but those numbers get out of date very quickly.
The site does have a drawback though, in that its got more information than most general consumers care about on it, and its not necessarily all in one place - there's no way to say "tell me all the scotches at this store," for example. And the only way to get at the information in the first place is to place a search. There are no full listings available.
In response, I've created this
handy site for disseminating some of this information. It queries the liquor board site for the lists of Scotch, then grabs every store that each whisky is sold at and makes a blog post out of it. The first draft of the site only posted a flat text list. I got some feedback that it was hard to read/use so I added some HTML and JavaScript to make it a folding style list - click on a scotch to toggle whether or not you see the stores its sold at.
There are some bugs in it right now; it jumps back to the top of the page when you expand a location list, the list of scotches isn't sorted, the location lists aren't sorted, and probably others. I'm going to try and have this bug list fixed by the end of the weekend.
After that, its on to new features. For example, I'm also thinking that I'll try and call out different Scotches as they appear or disappear from the list. Any other ideas, I'm open to hearing.

