MyFolia reviewed on Killer Startups!

MyFolia just got a great review on Killer Startups - go check it out!

Myfolia.com - Social Network for Gardeners

MyFolia has been nominated for Best Garden Site in the Mouse and Trowel Awards!

I thought we'd announced this on the blog, but we have been quite busy bees over the last week or so and completely forgot about posting it here...We've been nominated for Best Garden Site in the Mouse and Trowel Awards! Thanks to all who nominated us!

To cast your vote, here is the voting form.

Deploying some changes - hold tight!

For updates, see our twitter feed. We'll be back up very soon :)

More Statistical Goodness for Plants!

Another new feature to look out for (told you all that this one was gonna be a big release!) is some more statistical niceness on the plant pages – you’ll find a super-cool graph on each plant page that gives you an overview of how many plantings were sown / planted each month. Take a look at the plant page for Tomato for a good example. Eventually, this should show us some trends as to when the most popular time for planting is (and we can also eventually show this for your area as well)

As a first little experiment into drilling into the planting data, we’ve added a new section to the “Days to Germination” section (under the “How long does it approximately take to grow?” header towards the bottom of the page). You’ll now see the average days to germination, the min and the max. We are basing these calculations on the date planted vs. the date you all journaled and marked as “Germinated”.

The data is looking quite accurate at the moment, well done guys for your observations so far :)

New Feature: Your Planting's Happiness Rating!

As part of this release, we also added the ability to set a “happiness rating” to your plant – either Very Happy, Happy, Neutral, Sad or Very Sad. This rating will appear as a little smiley / frowney / crying face next to your planting on your garden pages and also on your planting lists. You’ll find the option to select your happiness rating from the (new and improved) planting edit page.

We think it gives another way to log how your plants are doing in general, and will also let us do some more funky stuff around finding what conditions plants grow best in.

New Feature: Most "Popular" Journals

We have noticed over the last couple of weeks as we have moved towards more "event" based journals (like "Sown" / "Bloomed" etc) that it is becoming harder and harder to find journal entries. We've made a couple of changes to the journal page and the home page to address this issue.

You'll now find the most commented / thumbs up'd journals over on the home page, and the first tab on the Journals page will now present the most commented entries (which you can now filter by a timeframe, like day or month or year). This should make sure that interesting journals are not buried as much as they once were, and gives everyone a few more ways of discovering new journals.

Recent journals have now been moved to their own tab on the Journals page so you can still see the most recent entries. Furthermore, there are a couple of options that have been added to this page so that all events can be filtered out (or likewise, all normal journal entries can be filtered out)

Let us know what you think of the changes!

New features coming up!

Just giving everyone a heads-up that we will be releasing some changes in the next hour or so (20:00 BST) - this release is a fairly big one so we may have to take the site down for 5 - 10 minutes...

20:10BST: The database changes are all going through now - not long to go :)

20:12BST: Still updating the database (and suddenly realising that our database is quite massive indeed now!)

20:14BST: woo hoo - all back up and running with new and improved features!

Nominate us for a Mouse & Trowel Award!

There are only a couple more days of nominations left, so if you feel like MyFolia deserves to be nominated for "Gardening Web Site of the Year" then go forth and vote!

Mouse & Trowel Nomination Form

More (Little) Goodies For You!

We've just added a couple of different mini badges for your blog or site over on our Goodies Page. Get 'em while they're hot!

Thumbs Up!

Another feature that we have just rolled out tonight is the “Thumbs Up!” feature for journals – its a way of giving a little bit of support or encouragement to a gardener, without having to write a comment (although you are quite welcome to do both if the entry deserves it!)

It acts much the same as your faves for gardens and plantings – the recipient of the “thumbs up” will be notified in their activity stream of your kind and thoughtful action and they will feel all warm and fuzzy :)

Plant Wiki - New Fields, Measurement Config & General Tweak

We’ve just rolled out a change to the plant wiki to add in a couple of new fields and to make it more customisable – you can now set your preferred unit of measurement (imperial or metric) on your Configuration page and all wiki facts and figures will appear in your measurement of choice (If you aren't logged in, you'll still see both measurements together)

We’ve also done a minor bit of tweaking to the plant pages to make them a little easier to read and to make room for the new fields. The next version of the variety wiki is heading to the top of the to-do list, so if anyone has any thoughts (that they haven’t already posted in the Suggestions & Feedback) let us know!