Now with Garden Journals!

This is probably the longest release thus far but it's definitely the most worthwhile!

We have garden journals! For those that like to journal more about the garden itself rather then the individual plants, well, your time has come! And you also get all the trimmings so your garden journal will appear on the Journals page as well as being able to receive comments from other gardeners. You also get limited HTML ability so you can make things bold and italic as well as link to other sites. To help with your new tools we've also created a Help + FAQ section which we'll be adding to over the coming weeks.

Whilst I was slaving over Garden Journals, Nic was cleverly enhancing the Garden Plants and Garden pages. Now feel free to add the botanical name of the plant in your garden (if you know it), or fill in the zone of your garden or even give it a name to remember it by (for those that have more than one garden type).

More info on how to use all the new features will be in the forum. Hope you enjoy!

Folia Downtime Yesterday

Hey guys - we had a bit of server downtime today due to our current server reaching its memory allocations (due to the recent increase in users).

We've upgraded the servers, so we should be up and running once again.

Many many many apologies to any of our beta testers trying to access the site yesterday.

Woohoo! Favourites!

We've just updated the site and added some spanky new features for everyone to check out: like favourites! You can now add gardens and plants to your favourites list and see wo has your gardens and plants in their favourties list.

Other goodies in this release is harvesting and removing of plants in your gardens, a brand spanking new journals page where you can catch up on the recent happening of the folia gardeners, as well as a whole other bunch of other improvements!

Improvements - and our 150th member!

We've just gone and put up a mini release with stacks of little bits and pieces throughout the site, so beta testers - take a look around!

We have also just reached 150 members - not bad for two weeks we think! With the 150th member, we have now reached the limit for the original "seedling" link, so we will be granting people beta access from our waiting list every couple of days or so, depending on how many people we think we can handle.

Thanks once again to all our fantastic beta testers and the wonderful ideas they have come up with so far :)

New Garden Types and Planting Date Improvements

We've added a stack more garden types for you to choose from: Herb Garden (thanks dee), Verge (thanks jacqueline), cottage, vegetable, rock, butterfly, community, desert, hanging, heirloom, container and flower (all from nic - she's been busy!)

We've also tidied up the plantings page a bit. You can now use the date drop downs (thanks Herb, Arkantos, and everyone else for the suggestion) and added an "I Don't Know" checkbox for plants you can't remember when you planted (thanks Kari and Herb)

Nic's been working on the forums and made them a lot easier to use - you'll notice that you don't have to remember the previous threads when you reply to a post (thanks everyone for suggesting that one!)

As usual, let us know what you think!

Introducing the Folia Forum!

We've just gone live with the very first version of the folia forum - this is going to be the place you can go to give us feedback, site suggestions, and to help folia newbies. You can still feel free to contact us directly if you want to discuss something - alternatively, you can now post your ideas to the forum and see what other people think about them.

We also made a couple of little other improvements here and there while we were at it - you'll now notice the new "gardens" tab (thanks to ilkirk for the suggestion!) which shows you gardeners for each type of garden.

Let us know what you think!

Flickr Buddy Icons

Looks like we might have a little issue with saving the link to your flickr buddy icons - we are looking into it now.

Site Update

We uploaded a new version of the site last night that included some changes requested so far - here is a quick rundown of what we've changed (and who asked for it!):

• We've added some links around the site to make it easier to go from your gardens to plants to journals (thanks Herb & Kelly)
• Fixed the plants tag cloud - (thanks Herb)
• Fixed the captcha on the sign up page for Safari users (thanks Marj Joly & Kelly)

Keep the feedback coming in - we are so impressed with the ideas and improvements you are suggesting already, its been a huge help!

p.s. We are working on the first bit of community goodness right now, so it shouldn't be too long before we put some more interesting things up for you all to test!

Beta testers

Well we went live with the beta site on Sunday night after Nic posted to a few forums in flickr and sending some direct emails out to some of the blogs we read. We thought that we'll put a limit on the initial beta users at 50 thinking that we'll reach it by the end of the month.

Well, we're going to reach it by the end of the day at this rate!

We couldn't be more happier with the response we're getting in both the signups and the website feedback. There are a lot of ideas and hopefully we'll be able to work through each of them.

If we do reach the 50 limit then don't despair, we're monitoring the signups for the time being and activating people almost immediately!

Nath

Welcome to the blog

Welcome to the myfolia blog. We've had to quickly set up a blogger account as we don't have the time to create a "proper" one on our site yet :). Hopefully, we should be able to find the time to write the odd article and let you guys know what we're doing and what new things to expect on the horizon.

We've got a whole bunch of ideas (and we hope that you have a whole bunch too!) and we're going to try and get them out onto the site a quickly as possible so that you all can try it out!

Remember bookmark this page, or if you have RSS then add it to your RSS reader and check back regularly.

Nath