Not a huge amount in the papers in the last week or so about pubs until Saturday when the news that an examiner had been appointed to Capitol Bars (Café en Seine, The George, Howl at the Moon and Zanzibar).  I’m not really surprised at the claim that sales were down 20% when the group [...]

The vintner’s call for support from the government has been discussed a few times, with the Irish Times taking the position that the vintner’s have no one to blame but themselves.  While the VFI has been pushing the idea that pubs are an institution, the Times rightly points out that they’re a business like any [...]

I got interviewed this evening by Scott Williams on Q102’s ‘On the QT‘ show about the site.  It was a little shorter than I expected but hopefully people will know a bit about the site afterwards.  There’s an MP3 of the segment here.
What will be interesting is to see what impact it will have on [...]

A few stories of note popping up this week about pubs.
The Vintners Federation of Ireland are saber rattling again over pub closures.  They’re now warning of significant job losses across the sector.  They’ve upped their figure of pubs closed since 2001 from 1500 to 1700 (meaning there are still 300 more pubs than in 2000).  [...]

There was a nice little mention of the site in the Pricewatch Daily article in today’s Times.  That’s cheered me up considerably since I’ve been trying to work up the enthusiasm to work on a few improvements for the site.
Apparently the average price of a pint in Dublin is €4.85 according to the CSO.  That’s [...]

Well thank God for that, pubs can still serve up pints as pints and not as half litres.
Pint saved as EU allows Ireland and UK to opt out of metric system

The Licensed Vintners’ Association (LVA) and the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland (VFI) announced to day that there would be a year long price freeze in over 5,500 of their members pubs.  The possibility of members dropping prices was even mooted.
The two organisations also went on about the 1500 closed pubs since 2001 again.  This bit [...]

With the release of Zend 1.7 and a native twitter service along with a paginator I did a quick code update today to take advantage of these.  The paginator class is particularly useful as it’s a little more robust than the quick and dirty one I’d written.  The other minor change is that when you [...]

I’ve been developing a little Java app for mobile phones with EclipseME.  The app’s gotten to the stage where I wanted to put it a phone to do some testing there.  It all seemed simple enough – select ‘Create Package’ from the menu and copy the resulting jar file to the phone.  However, when I [...]

The latest feature I’ve added to the site is a Pub Crawl creator.  You can browse and search for crawls created by other people to see if there are any that suit or just create one yourself from your favourite bars.
When you view a crawl, you’ll see the list of bars in the suggested order [...]