A few weeks back, I was catching up on new posts over at Cigar Clubhouse, when I saw Stephen Boyajian (owner of Cigar Clubhouse) mention a new project that he was working on. The project he mentioned was CigarFriendly.us and it is basically a database of cigar friendly establishments.
Because of how frequently a new cigar site hits the web, I find it difficult to get excited about anything without giving it some time to develop. Over the past couple of weeks, I kept an eye on the site to see how the progress was coming along.
On Tuesday morning I decided to give the submission process a test drive. Registering for an account was quick and painless, before long I was all set up to begin listing cigar friendly establishments I’ve done business with.
After several minutes of research and keying in information, I had a bunch of shops added to the database. Somewhere along the way, Jerry also began entering in cigar friendly establishments that he has visited. The two of us got caught up in creating new entries and it became a mini competition, or sorts. The only rule was that we only placed the shops we have visited into the database.
When the dust settled a short time later, we were both tapped out and couldn’t come up with any other shops to add. Jerry’s total was fifteen shops while my total weighed in at twelve shops. The flurry of activity seemed to become amplified on Twitter and a number of other people joined in, entering their local cigar shops. A few hours after all of this activity started, nearly one-hundred new additions were incorporated into the user-driven database.
After watching the site for a time to see it develop, then diving in to make submissions, I’m definitely liking the site. Given some time, I can see it really taking off and holding thousands of cigar friendly establishments across the county.
Cigar Friendly establishment into the database?
Another non-review?…come on, Walt! You should do better than this…I mean…it’s not like you have a job, other interests, your wife, a baby on the way, and….oh, wait…lol
j/k, man, and given your rundown of this, I’ll probably go check it out now.
This sounds great, too bad I live in California and the only places that a person can smoke is at a cigar shop or a Casino, which luckily there are plenty of. Keep up the work Walt and the rest of the stogie review family, and Walt thanks for answering my question about the cilantro the other day.
It is a very nice site that will be just awesome once more people enter information into it! It is coming along nicely. Only thing I can see impacting the site is if people dont/cant update their entries down the road. Say a shop closes, new laws are passed, etc. Other than that, it is a great resource that will get even better in time!
Mike
I agree… I think people NOT updating their posts could be an issue, sice only ones allowed to modify the listing are the original posters… but they do have a handy “flag if this is Non-smoking” doohicky.
I like it because its similar to the Amazon/ebay feedback systems, and you can read peoples comments, and see the star ratings… very handy!
Thanks for the write up Walt! I am happy to see it continue to grow!
Mike — You can edit your own listing by clicking the “Manage my listings” on the top of the screen. Also, anyone who is registered and logged in can tag a location as non-smoking (if they close, stop offering the space, laws are passed) and they will go into a queue for an administrator to verify before disabling the listing.
I may open it up in the future to more of a wiki setup where other people can modify certain aspects of the listing in the event that the original person does not.
I just signed up a couple of days ago and I agree, it’s very easy to use and has the potential to be a main source of information, especially for those travelling in an unfamiliar location.
Good Job, Stephen!
Just logged my workplace. Thanks for this Walt. Very cool.
Very cool site! I like this alot, I hope it grows!