Last year I published MN Coffee, an app that helps people find coffee no matter where they are in Minnesota. It started out as MPLS coffee and now morphed into MN Coffee. I built this app because no matter where I was, I wanted to get a good cup of coffee or espresso. Using Yelp or Google Maps never really returned all of the results at once. Usually I had to scroll through pages and pages to find them all.
The app is available in iOS and Android stores, but today I released a new web based version of the app. My goal was to make it as easy as possible to discover local coffee, see which shops are open, and get directions, all in one place - matter if you were on a device or your laptop. Every good app deserves to have a website along side it.
The website centers around an interactive map powered by Mapbox, showing you every coffee shop nearby or within the state of Minnesota if you do not allow location access to your browser. There’s also a list view, so you can filter by "open now", sort by distance, and check out ratings or feature tags. Each shop has its own detail page with hours, directions, and a quick summary generated by Google AI.
Here are some of the biggest features:
- Interactive Coffee Shop Map: Mapbox-powered, geolocation, search bar, and mobile-friendly.
- Comprehensive Coffee Shop List: Filter by open now, distance sorting, live status, ratings, AI summaries, and feature tags. Powered by Outscraper and updated monthly(ish).
- Shop Detail Pages: SEO-friendly URLs, full details, directions, and breadcrumbs.
- Mobile App Integration: App Store & Google Play links.
- Advanced Search & Filtering: Filter coffee shops by name and sort by distance.
- SEO & Social Sharing: Implemented the full suite of SEO and social best practices with meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, structured data, and canonical URLs.
- About Page & Community: Mission statement, contact, and social links.
On the technical side, the website is built with ASP.NET Core MVC (C#) for the backend, and uses JavaScript, jQuery, and Mapbox GL JS on the front end. Bootstrap 5 keeps the design clean and responsive, and all the coffee shop data is managed in JSON files and services for filtering and sorting.
If you want to try it out or contribute, you can get started quickly by following these steps:
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/clintmcmahon/mn-coffee-web.git - Run the app:
cd mn-coffee-web/MNCoffeeWeb dotnet run - Visit in your browser: http://localhost:5247 (or the port shown in your terminal)
I hope MN Coffee helps you explore all of Minnesota’s excellent coffee shops. If you have suggestions or want to get involved, feel free to reach out. I'd love to have some other caffinated hands on these projects!