Look! We have new tabs!

Hey all – you’ve probably already noticed this one, but I thought I might as well mention the elephant in the room: we’ve just rolled out a little bit of a redesign. Weeee!

After two years of the same header, we thought it was high time to give it a bit of a makeover – we’ve shrunk the header banner down a bit, tidied up the logo and made the tabs tabbier. I’ve also added in some brand new icons too (we now have an icon for gardens – yay!) The tabs are partly designed using the latest and greatest styling technology (CSS3 to anyone in the know) and as a result will look their best in new (standards-based) browsers. So, if anyone is still clinging on to their old browsers, using our lovely new tabs in their full glory has to be a compelling reason to upgrade, no? ;)

This makeover is part of a wider redesign that we are attempting to do slowly in bits and pieces across the site – so you should notice some areas of the site starting to become tidier and nicer looking over time. Let us know if you spot anything that looks a bit weird or out of alignment and we’ll take a look into it :)

Vote for us in the Techcrunch Europa Awards!

Hey all – we’ve got a bit of a favour to ask: we’ve been nominated in the Techcrunch Europa awards for Best Bootstrapped Startup (yay!) and we need your vote!

Click here to vote for MyFolia for Best Bootstrapped Startup

There is no signup or email required to vote, it’s just a simple click-and-vote process on PollDaddy – so if you have a spare second or two to vote for us we’d be very grateful! Voting ends this Wednesday – so be quick!

For anyone not in the internet industry and wondering what a “bootstrapped startup” is: A bootstrapped startup is any website run by people who are completely funding it themselves – with no outside company involvement or investment. The two of us have been running Folia completely our of our own pocket right from day one and we are really proud of how far we have taken it, and how much support we have had from all of our wonderful, amazing users in this time.

Many thanks for your support guys!

Defeating the spammers

This month we've received an influx of backlink spammers setting up accounts and posting only links to sites they've set up. Apparently some site out there that does this for a living found our site, due to it's high page rank, and recommended us for it's backlink spamming newsletter. As a result we've been spending most waking moments checking who has signed up and deleting accounts that only set up 'spam gardens'.

We've also changed the site so that when a 'spam garden' is set up, and we don't notice it then we've put nofollow attributes to all links posted on the site. This pretty much renders the links as useless in the eyes of search engines and hopefully will deter these type of spammers over time.

Because we use RedCloth for all our text formatting on the site we can manipulate the text before rendering it to the site. This code sits in our initializers folder as redcloth_extenstions.rb of our Rails application:

module RedCloth::Formatters::HTML
  include RedCloth::Formatters::Base

  def link(opts)
    "<a href=\"#{escape_attribute opts[:href]}\"#{pba(opts)} rel=\"nofollow\">#{opts[:name]}</a>"
  end
  
  def inline_html(opts)
    no_follow(opts[:text])
  end

  private

  def no_follow(text)
    tokenizer = HTML::Tokenizer.new(text)
    out = ''
    while token = tokenizer.next
      node = HTML::Node.parse(nil, 0, 0, token, false)
      if node.tag? and node.name.downcase == 'a'
        node.attributes['rel'] = 'nofollow' unless node.attributes.nil?
      end
      out << node.to_s
      puts out
    end
    out
  end
end

The link override is the inbuilt link generator for textile, so, anyone who creates a link using the textile format will have the nofollow attribute added to their link.

The inline_html is called to check for html generated by the user (as we allow basic html support). This scans the html and looks for link tags then adds the nofollow automatically.

Without using RedCloth as our markup generator I'm not sure how we would have gone about in adding these attributes.

Create a list of your favourite retailers!

On your gardener dashboard, in the bottom right corner, you’ll now find a new little widget box called “Faves”. This box has direct linkage to your fave gardens, fave plantings and…your new Fave Retailers page!

That’s right – you can now fave retailers on folia and keep a list for handy reference. As we don’t have a retailer search yet (it’s on its way!) we’ve added a link to this page to show you all the retailers you’ve used on folia so far so you can “quick fave” them. To add them to your faves list, just click the pink heart icon and it will be instantly added to your list.

p.s. While you’re at it, we’d love it if you took a quick look at the details of your fave retailers and add any contact details or missing information too. We’re also doing a big retailer cleanup this week, so if you notice any duplicates let us know and we’ll clean them up at the same time.

New faster search for folia

Hey Everyone!

In this release we’ve change the search on the site around a bit. I’m sure you’ve all noticed how slow it was in returning a specific plant or journal post or even have slow it was in just saving posts and topics. Ultimately, the search that we had running wasn’t coping with the massive growth on the site. Our weekly usage stats keeps going up, everyone is journalling and gardening like mad and we have well over 100 000 different plants and varieties (most of which were added in the last few weeks).

Hopefully we’ve fixed all of this and sped things up with switching over to the new search. By our test runs its looking like a huge improvement. Indexing the site now take about 30 secs (down from hours and hours) and the results are retrieved in a faction of a second from the database and it shouldn’t be as slow when you save topics and posts.

However with all good things, there’s also some setbacks. Our old search was using a system called Ferret which was slow but allowed for updates in real time (so when you added a planting, it would instantly update the search) however we’ve switched to Sphinx which has quick indexing but no real time updates. To counter this – I’ve told Sphinx to reindex itself every 2 minutes or so. There’s a few other things I can do to make it feel more ‘instant’ but for now it’s a good starting point. Currently Sphinx is running on Plants, Varieties / Cultivars, Groups, Topics (yes! you can now search topics across groups! Posts are coming soon!) and Journals/Questions. So if something you added hasn’t popped up yet – give it some time and it will appear in a short while. Ferret is still used to index Gardens and Plantings as we need real time updates for the milestones and tasks – but we’re looking into switching over these too.

Also with the new search comes a different search algorithm – just like how Yahoo and Google never return the same results. So the results won’t appear exactly like they used to in the old search. These will be mainly for the better as we’ve got some good matching improvements, but there’s bound to be the odd plant that doesn’t appear in the list like it did before. It’s still very much a work in progress whilst we tweak it for the site.

So have a play around and tell us what you think.

Harvest Tracking is Here (and Automatic Moving too!)

After working through all your suggestions and feedback about how you want to track your harvests on Folia, we’ve finally rolled out version 1 of Harvest Tracking! We’re really excited about this one (especially me, as I got my first harvest of the year a couple of days ago – how’s that for good timing!)

New Milestone Notes

When you next go to add a new journal item to your journal you should now notice there is a new text field with a comment bubble image. That’s a new field that you can use to write a bit of detail about each journal item – it’s completely optional, but really handy when you want to note a bit more about the event. It’s deliberately limited to 140 characters (just like twitter!) as it is intended to be for short notes that describe the event. So, for example: if you log a treating event for your sick little plant, you can pop a quick little note about what treatments you used. If you log a “Purchase” event you could log how much it was. It’s totally up to you how you use this feature, but hopefully it should give you much more flexibility in how you want to log information in your journal. This feature is for Folia Supporters only – check out our Become a Supporter! page for details.

Harvest Tracking

If you now select “Harvesting” as your event type for a journal item you’ll now magically get a couple of new fields appear – these fields will let you log the number of things you harvested, what amount type it was (items, baskets, cups etc.) and how much it weighed in total. These amounts are then tallied and displayed on your planting page in a new section called “Harvest Tally”. As you can see from my Strawberry example , you can mix and match the units as much as you like – it will tally up all items that are the same and display them together. The weight measurements are also totalled separately to the unit tally – so it should work equally well for precision gardeners that like getting their scales out, and for gardeners that like to work in rough numbers of bowls and bags (I think I might be in the second group there!). We’ve set your default units based on if you are in the US (lb) or elsewhere (kg) – apologies if you are a staunch metric-er and you live in the states! You can however change your default preference on your Account Configuration page to your unit of choice. This feature is for Folia Supporters only – check out our Become a Supporter! page for details.

Automatic moving of your Plantings from your Journal

Whilst we were at it, we also managed to build in a nice little automatic move feature to the journals. What you can do now if you select a “move” event (like transplanted, moved or planted out) is also select which garden it’s being moved to – and it will automatically move it there for you. As a bonus, it also logs where the planting has moved from and to for you! Check out my basil moving journal for an example of how the new move journal items look

Handy dandy links

• If you need some help with understanding how harvest tracking / planting moving works: Help!

• If you think you’ve found a bug: Bugs & Issues

• If you have any ideas on how we can make things better around the site: Suggestions & Feedback

Filter your growing timeline by garden / Lots-O-Plants

It’s been a bit of a quiet week in terms of new stuff due to our little camping trip last week (yes, it did rain - the entire time!), but we’ve managed to sneak in a couple of minor improvements and bug fixes for you all. One of the improvements is a new filter on your growing timelines* that lets you filter by garden – this should hopefully make navigating around your timelines just a little bit easier :)

We’ve been also working away on a couple of features in the background too – we’ve been importing a whole heap of new plants into the system to make our plant database much more complete and accurate. At last count, we now have a staggering 79,454 plants now in the system – wow indeed! (..and that’s not even counting cultivars and varieties in which we have many thousands more.)

Due to this sudden surge in new plants, we’ve had to start doing a huge amount of work rejigging things like the plant search logic – we’re still working on rewriting this part of the site but we’re hoping that the search is working well enough for now (let us know if it’s not!) We’ll be tweaking and stablising the search over the next couple of weeks, but we’d love your help in testing it out – we’ll let you know when we start rolling out the changes.

*Growing timelines are a Supporter feature – Supporters help us pay for hosting costs to keep this site up-and-running. If you’d like to become a Supporter, check out the Become a Supporter! page.

Read more in the Announcements group: http://myfolia.com/groups/4-folia-announcements/topics/2298/posts