Steep it Together Documentation

Welcome to Steep It Together! Steep It Together is a website where tea lovers can document their experiences with tea. This document will take you through the steps of setting up your account and utilizing the various resources the website has to offer. Let’s get started!

To access the website, type in the url “steepittogether.com,” which will bring you to the website’s homepage.

Steep It Together requires that its users have an account to access the website. To create a free account, click on the “register” link in the navigation bar, which will take you to a page with a registration form.

Enter a username for yourself, an email which will be linked to your account, and a password, which you must also confirm.

Once you have clicked the submit button, a message will appear that reads “Congratulations! Your account has been registered successfully. Check your email for a confirmation link,” and a confirmation link will be sent to the email address you used to sign up.

Check your email for a message sent from mailto:steepittogether@gmail.com with the subject line “Steep It Together account confirmation,” and click on the login link included in the email.

This link will bring you to the login page, where you can then enter the information corresponding to your newly made account. In the case that you forget your password for Steep It Together, simply click on the “Forgot Your Password” link below the log in button. You will be brought to a page where you can input the email you used to sign up for an account.

If you enter an email that is not associated with an existing account, you will receive an error message, and have a chance to try again.

If you enter an email address that is associated with an account, you will receive the following success message and an email to reset your password.

Clicking on the link will bring you to a page where you can reset your account’s password. Once your password has been reset, a confirmation message will appear on the screen, and you can log into your account with your updated password.

To log in, simply input your username and password and click the log in button.

After successfully logging in, you will be taken to the home page, My Tea Collection, pictured above. In the navigation bar, there are also links to Log a Cup, Journal, Spilling Tea, and Tea Utilities, but we will individually go through these other links later and will focus on My Tea Collection for now.

My Tea Collection serves as an inventory for all of your tea. On this page, you will be able to see all the teas you have inputted into your collection, i.e., all the teas you “own” and have access to. It will be empty when you begin, but you can add as many teas as you would like to your collection.

Let’s start by adding our first tea! To add a tea, click on the green button labeled “Add a Tea,” which will bring you to the form pictured below.

Let’s say I took a box that contained 15 teabags of Bigelow English Teatime from the Lowell Dining Hall and I wanted to add this tea to my inventory. To add this tea to my collection, I would fill out the fields in the form using the information I have about this tea.

Fill out the “Brand” and “Name” boxes according to your chosen tea, in this case, Bigelow and English Teatime. Clicking on “Tea Type” will give you a drop down menu where you can select the specific type of tea: green, black, green, herbal, white, rooibos, or other. Bigelow’s English Teatime is a black tea, so we’ll select that option. “Tea Preparation,” when clicked on, is also a drop down menu, where you can select how this particular tea is meant to be prepared: loose leaf, matcha powder, tea bag(s), or other. Selecting tea bags will ask you for the number, but if you select loose leaf or matcha powder, you will be asked to input the number of ounces. In this case, we are adding 15 tea bags, so we will type in the number 15. “Where did you purchase this tea?” is filled out manually, and “Price,” the final form question, requires a numeric input. In this case, we took it from the dining hall, so it was free. Once you have filled out the form, click on the “submit” button at the bottom of the page. A notification will appear at the top of the page confirming your addition to your collection.

Now let’s return to our tea collection by clicking on the “Tea Collection” link in the navigation bar. The 15 bags of Bigelow English Teatime we added to our collection are now visible!

You can add as many teas to your collection as you would like; simply click the “Add a Tea” button and follow the same procedure as above. Now that we have tea in our collection, we can utilize the other features of the website. Let’s click on Log a Cup.

When you click on the Log a Cup link, you will be brought to the page shown above. The Log a Cup page is used to document your experiences with tea once you’ve drank it.

Clicking on the “Choose your tea” box will bring up a list of all the teas you have available in your collection. Once we select the tea we would like to log, we can fill out the rest of the form.

Let’s say you drank one cup of that Bigelow’s English Teatime to get you through CS50’s Hackathon. Select “Bigelow English Teatime” from the dropdown menu, add “1” to “Amount used,” and then write whatever you would like to remember about the experience in the “Notes about your tea drinking experience” box. If you would like, you can also upload a picture of your tea. I don’t have a picture to upload, so I will leave that blank. Click on the log button once you have filled out the form to log your tea to your journal.

After clicking “log,” you will be returned to the My Tea Collection page, where your collection will have been updated. As you can see, our collection of Bigelow’s English Teatime has dropped to 14. Every time you fill out the Log a Tea form, the amount of tea you have in your collection will be updated accordingly.

All tea that you log will be uploaded as an entry into your journal, which serves as an overview of your experiences with tea. Clicking on the Journal link in the navigation bar will bring us to this history. This allows you review each tea that you drink! When we do this, we are brought to the following page, where we can see the journal entry we just logged! Additionally, you’ll notice that since we did not upload a picture, the website automatically uploaded a photo of a bun in a cup. So cute!

Let’s move on to Spilling Tea, where you can read about other Steep It Together users’ experiences with tea. By clicking on the link, you will be brought to a website-wide journal where you can read the entries different users have made to their journals. This page will automatically be updated every time a user logs a tea into their journal, so you can see what others have been up to. For example, we might see that Emma drank tea with her favorite bun, Ken drank some with friends, and CS50 (you) had some before the hackathon.

Finally, let’s click on the Tea Utilities link. This link will bring you to a page with a tea timer, shown below. The tea timer is used to help you determine how long you should steep your tea. White tea, for example, should be steeped for three minutes, while Rooibos should be steeped for six, and this can affect your tea drinking experience. This timer automatically determines how long the tea should be steeped for based on the tea type you input.

Click the “Start” button when you start steeping your tea to start the timer. The “Reset” button will allow you to reset the timer. The timer will automatically stop when it is done.

To log out of your account, click the Log Out link in the navigation bar. That’s it! Thank you for joining us at Steep It Together, and we hope this was a helpful overview of our website. Cheers!