Folia Blog | Social garden journal, tracker & garden organizer

Come join the wiki group (and earn some badges)!

2010-12-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

Hi all – I’m currently kick-starting some winter wiki projects over in the Wiki group , so if you feel you might like to participate, come and join in!

There is no obligation, you can do as much or as little as you like. You definitely don’t have to be an plant expert to take part – if you know how to google and find information from various sources that’s pretty much all it takes!

As a bonus, if you haven’t already earned your wiki badges (Contributor , Editor and Curator ) , then it’s also an excellent chance to get a start on these!

First project is Vitis – I’ve made a start on this, but still plenty left to do :)

Suggestions for next projects for the wiki are also most welcome!

Our first official Bloom Day is this Wednesday!

2010-12-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day (started I believe by the creator of the May Dreams Gardens blog a couple of years ago ) we thought we would create a badge to honour those bloggers on Folia that are also participating in this wonderful gardeners online event each month!

To participate and earn your December Bloom Day badge, simply log a Bloom event on the 15th of December (that’s this Wednesday – mark your calendars!).

Although this one might be a bit of a challenge for those in the northern hemisphere as it’s now getting pretty wintery , those on the opposite end of the world have a great chance to get this badge and show the rest of us what’s currently blooming! We’ll feature some of the best blooms throughout the day on the site, on our facebook page and on Twitter

More details over on our Badge group post (while you’re there, consider joining our group if you want to hear the latest on new Folia badges!)

Folia Faire 2010 - The Winners!

2010-12-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

Over the past week, Nath and I have been busy tallying results for the Folia Faire, and have managed to whittle away the nominations to a final set of winners.

Without further ado here are the results of the Folia Faire 2010 !

Congratulations to all awardees – you’ll be receiving your official Folia Faire Awardee badges very soon!

Woohoo! It's Folia Faire time again!

2010-11-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of the year again! Like any good village faire, we’re holding a friendly contest to find the biggest, best and most beautiful plants and gardens on Folia.

To remind you of all the fun we had last year, here were the winners for 2009.

This year we are going to change the way that the nomination and vote process works a little bit – you’ll find a nomination form here that you can fill out to nominate your favourite for each category. Voting is anonymous – if you want to add reasons why you nominated each one, feel free! We’ll compile the best comments and display on the final award results page.

You can fill out as many as you like, and you can nominate yourself if you want. Try to include links where possible as it will make it easier for us to tally and to award the winners. The only rule is: the nominee needs be a member of Folia, and the journal, plant or garden needs to be posted on Folia to be eligible.

Let the Faire begin! Voting will be open from 14 Nov – 30 Nov 2010

Folia Village Faire Nomination Form 2010

Along with the main nominated categories, as part of the Faire you’ll notice that we’ll be releasing a ton of interesting new awards and badges over the coming weeks (so far, this weekend we have just released the Old Growth badge, the First Sprout badge and the First Bloom badge, with plenty more on the way) For more info on what badges have already been released, hints on new badges and to make suggestions for new ones we should consider join our new Folia Badges group!

What are My Frost Dates? instant search (BETA)

2010-08-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

New this week is another (beta) search page for finding your frost dates:

What Are My Frost Dates?

The idea is that this will be a standalone tool (exactly the same as the new What’s My Zone search page) – it should work worldwide as it is based on everyone’s Folian Frost Date observations. For the same reason, it can be a little less accurate as we are dealing with real data so we need your help to make it as good as it can be:

Check that you currently have the most accurate Frost Dates listed in your Gardener configuration settings

To make sure at the start that we are using the most accurate data available, instead of using the search to check your Frost Dates, try and validate your dates with an outside source if you can. Frost dates can be quite difficult to find, so it would be great if anyone finds some good sources that they could list them in this thread for others to use.

I’ll start with a few that I have found in my travels around the net:

http://www.victoryseeds.com/frost/ (US)

http://www.gardenaction.co.uk/main/weather.asp (US, UK and Australia)

"What's My USDA Zone?" Instant Search

2010-08-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

Hi all – this week, we’ve also rolled out a new (beta) search page for finding your zone:

What’s My USDA Zone?

The idea is that this will be a standalone tool that anyone can use to check what zone they are in – it works worldwide as it is based on everyone’s Folian Zone observations. For the same reason, it can be a little less accurate as we are dealing with real data so we need your help to make it as good as it can be:

Check that you currently have the most accurate Zone listed in your Gardener profile, and each of your Gardens.

Make sure you are using the USDA Zone scale, not Sunset / Aussie etc. as different scales will effect the accuracy of the search.

To make the conversion easier, we have also developed a new Aussie to USDA Zone converter to easily check what your USDA zone is (if you don’t know your Aussie zone, check this site first).

Sunset to USDA is a bit trickier as Sunset is much more granular than USDA, so several Sunset Zones can be the same USDA Zone. We’re still working on a converter for this, but in the meantime you can find a basic converter here (if anyone can find any others, let us know!)

The wikipedia entry on Hardiness Zones is also a good reference point to use.

Why does Folia use the USDA Zone system?
We are using the USDA zone system as our standard reference point as it is the most widespread and recognizable climate zone system. We know it has a limited practical application in places where frost dates are rare or non existent, but the main benefit of the system is to group gardeners together that are in similar climatic conditions – so it’s a useful system for Folia to use (until a better system comes along!).

Anyway, let us know what you think about the new What’s my Zone? page !

New Garden Harvest Tally Reports

2010-08-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

Quick note about a new feature for our lovely Supporters – from today, you’ll now see a “Harvest Tally” tab on your Garden profile pages.

This is a brand new page that summarises all of your harvest logs for every year of your garden. Instead of basing this on the traditional Jan – Dec calendar year, the year is based on whatever date you choose your gardening year to start at – you can configure this date over on your Account Configuration page.

The page is also nicely printable (only prints the tally, not the rest of the page), and also is exportable for import to your favourite spreadsheet program. You’ll find both of these options over on the right hand side of the page.

How far you can go back in your harvest history is also configurable – it’s based on your garden’s Established Year – to change, edit your garden and you’ll find a box to modify (under the Location details).

To see an example, check out my Rooftop Terrace Garden Harvest Tally from last year (I can already see that this year hasn’t been nearly as productive as last!), cristina’s Herb’s and vegetable garden or flowerweaver’s Vegetable garden (both have weights AND amounts recorded and are much more diligently entered than my own records!)

This feature is exclusively available to our Supporters. Supporters help us keep the site up-and-running and allow us to spend time working on funky new features like this one. Check out your Account Upgrade page for details on how you can become a Folia Supporter.

Let us know what you think! If you have any suggestions or issues with using this feature, please log it over in our new Support / Feedback area so we can track it through for you :)

New badges: Wiki Contributor / Editor / Curator

2010-07-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

Just before our trip back to Australia, we released a couple of new badges to the site to reward Folians that contribute to our plant / variety wiki.

The new badges are:

Wiki Contributor – Awarded to Folians that have contributed at least once to the plant wiki.
Wiki Editor – Awarded to Folians that have made a significant contribution to the Plant Wiki.
Wiki Curator – Awarded to Folians that have made an extraordinary contribution to the Folia Plant Wiki.

These awards will be instantly awarded when you contribute to the wiki the required number of times (we’re not going to disclose the exact number of edits you need for the Editor and Curator badges – they are definitely achievable though)

This time, we haven’t back awarded these badges to Folians who have already earned these – instead they will be calculated and awarded next time you edit the wiki – so go add something to the wiki and see what happens!

The Folia Mobile App is an Apple Staff Pick today

2010-07-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

We submitted the Folia Mobile Web app to the Apple directory early this week, and woke up this morning to find that they have featured us as a staff pick! Yay!

Here’s the link to the actual directory page if you want to take a look:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/foliagardentracker.html

Weekly Garden Planner Email Improvements

2010-06-30T04:36:00.000-07:00

We’ve added a couple of new things to the newsletter – here’s a quick rundown of what to look out for when it hits your inbox today:

Local Gardening Group logic has been tweaked and we are showing more than your closest one. If you are in the UK or Aust. you’ll now also see your country group.

Discussions This Week now show only topics from the groups you are a member of – so if you want a bit more variety than the Chit Chat group, get out there and join some more groups !

Recommended gardeners to follow now filters out the people you are already following, so keep checking the list every month to find more interesting Folians near you.

Plant Match Maker – this is a brand new beta section that we are trialling, it will sort through your Wish List and find matching items that people have marked as available to swap, and will also try and find you some matches from our retailer plant catalogue lists (* sales made through the product catalogue links give Folia a small income, so definitely consider having a look at some of these if you can!)

The Planting Planner (Sow, Transplant, Harvest) now shows 10 suggestions instead of the entire list (for people with huge seed stash lists this section was huge!). Instead, we are linking to a new filter on your Seed Stash page that will show you everything in your seed stash for the event and month of your choosing. Confused? It’s probably easier to explain with an example: check out my List of Stash items available to Sow in June

Fixed a bug that was preventing some of you from receiving your weekly dose of Folia goodness. Hopefully everyone is getting their emails through now, but if you aren’t – firstly check your Junk / Spam folders. If it isn’t there, let us know and we’ll look into it for you.

Hope you like the improvements!

Connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to Folia (and also earn a badge)!

2010-06-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

Hi all – we’ve just rolled out a brand new release of goodies to the site today, the biggest change being Facebook and Twitter integration!

Via the new Account page in your profile , you can now connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts directly to Folia. Everytime you post a new planting, milestone or journal you can choose if you wish to also post a message to either account. You don’t have to post all the time – just unselect the checkbox for either or all and your post will not be sent to either party.

As a little bonus, if you connect your accounts you’ll also get some awesome little “Connected!” badges on your profile :)

How do I connect my Twitter account with Folia?

Go to your new Account page in your profile
Click the “Sign-in with Twitter” light blue button and a window on twitter should appear asking you to authorize us. Remember that we will never post to your stream unless you ask us to.
Click the “Allow” option and you’ll be taken back to your account page – your twitter account details should now be displaying if everything went tickety-boo.

How do I connect my Facebook account with Folia?

Go to your new Account page in your profile
Click the “Sign-in with Facebook” dark blue button and a window on facebook should appear asking you to authorize us (if you aren’t signed in, it will display a sign-in box first). Facebook will request a couple of “advanced privileges” (as they call them) which basically authorizes Folia to post to your stream. Remember that we will never post to your stream unless you ask us to.
Click the “Allow” option and you’ll be taken back to your account page – your facebook account details should now be displaying if everything went tickety-boo.

As this is a huuuge change, we need your help in testing this feature – so connect your accounts, get posting and let us know if there are any problems in the Bugs & Issues group . Thanks!

Update: Forgot to also add that you can also use your Facebook profile pic on Folia if you want as well – after you connect your Facebook account, go to your Photos page and you should see your profile pic appear in the list of suggestions.

Folia Street Team relaunch - come join and help spread the word!

2010-06-18T04:39:00.000-07:00

I’m really eager to get the Folia Street Team going again, as it’s been a little neglected of late. I’ve just given the group a lick of paint with a brand new logo and banner, so join the group if you are interested in helping us to find ways to spread the word about the site now that the gardening season is in full swing!

Folia Street Team – A Grassroots Campaign

p.s. I might even be creating special limited edition Street Team badges for everyone who joins! ;)

Want to create a logo for your group?

2010-06-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that the Groups page is now looking a little more colourful and a lot more interesting – we’ve been busy adding logos and banners for the most popular groups.

We’d love to add more group images, so if you are the caretaker of a group and would like to create a logo and banner for your group, download your templates here…

http://myfolia.com/images/groups/template/square.png

http://myfolia.com/images/groups/template/banner.png

…and send them to hello@myfolia.com with the name of your group and we’ll upload them for you asap.

If you aren’t the caretaker of your group but you are interested in helping out, contact the caretaker to ask them if they are okay with you creating the images on their behalf and go for it!

New Blog Widget : Latest in my Seed Stash

2010-06-06T13:49:00.001-07:00

We've just released a new little blog widget to the site - this one shows the latest additions to your seed stash. You'll find the code to install over on the Goodies page.

Supporter Beta: The Folia Mobile App v0.1!

2010-06-05T04:31:00.000-07:00

We’ve just released the very first version of the Folia mobile app (YaY!), and we need help to test and improve it. So, get your smartphones at the ready and point your Safari browsers at:

http://myfolia.com/mobile

What do we currently have in version 0.1?

Planting Lists – see everything in your planted lists
Plant Wiki – search for plants and view the wiki (you can also add new plantings from here)
Add Milestone Events

The mobile app is currently in Supporter Beta – if you aren’t yet a Supporter, please consider becoming one as it helps us with hosting costs and allows us to make cool features like this one!

If you have an idea on how to make the mobile app better – let us know in the Suggestions & Feedback group.

If you’ve found a bug, or something isn’t working as you think it should – let us know in the Bugs & Issues group . If you could let us know what sort of device (iPhone, Android, iPad etc.) you are using, that would be great!

New! Quick Add Plantings & Milestones Box

2010-05-31T04:36:00.001-07:00

Hi all – everyone will now see the new yellow Quick Add box on their gardener homepages. Supporters have been testing the Quick Add milestone feature out for us for the last couple of weeks, and now we think it’s ready for everyone to use.

This box lets you quickly enter events for your existing plantings, add photos and other bits and pieces. If you havent yet created the planting yet, no problems – you can now switch instantly into Add New Planting mode on the same box! Click on the “Add new planting” link in the yellow headline area to switch views.

As this is a fairly complex feature, we’d love everyone’s help to get it tested – we’ll be testing and hot-fixing all day, so if you notice anything strange, log it in the Bugs & Issues group and we’ll get it fixed asap.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions for improvements, let us know in the Suggestions & Feedback group!

Quick Add Garden Milestones: "What's happening in your garden?"

2010-05-14T04:33:00.000-07:00

We released a new feature this morning – you’ll now find a new yellow box on your gardener dashboards called “What’s happening in your garden?”

This box lets you quickly add planting events without creating journal entries – perfect for when you want to quickly log events about your plantings but don’t have much to say about them. You can add notes, harvest quantities and all the usual bits and pieces that you can do from the existing journal page too.

As a bonus, we’ve also added a definition for each event – so you’ll never get your “flowering” mixed up with your “blooming” again! (A big thanks to our fab Folia Helpers for writing these event definitions for us!)

Below the Quick Add is a list of the most recent milestones that you’ve logged in your garden – and if you are feeling the urge to peek over the garden fence, you can also expand out to show latest milestones from gardeners you follow (network) and everyone on folia.

This is currently a Supporter Beta Feature – free account holders will not currently see this feature. If you are a Supporter, it would be fantastic if you can give us a hand to test this feature – if you find a bug, please log it in the Bugs & Issues group and we’ll get it fixed up asap!

Folia API Starts Now!

2010-05-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

At the core of the the brand spanking new widgets is the start of our Folia API.

For those who I’ve lost already, an API is a set of rules that allow software to send and receive data from other software (like Folia). The API will allow us (or you) to build iPhone Apps, Android Apps, Flash/AIR Apps, Desktop Apps, gosh just about any type of software that can talk to Folia via the Internet.

The first set of APIs we’re opening up are public ones relating to Gardener Mini-Profile, Latest Plantings and Latest Stash. We’ve built two blog widgets that utilise the Gardener and Latest Planting APIs and we’ve released the source code on googlecode so you can grab it, pull it apart and build other things with it. We’re hoping that we have some cleaver Folians that can make Wordpress plugins or embed these into Facebook in some way – which would be totally cool!

So with the first step done we can test the structure and load ready for the next step – the full blown authenticated API.

We’ll be working on releasing bits and pieces as we go – so the best place to keep up to date with this is by joining the Folia Developers group. Even if you’re just interested in the blog widgets then also feel free to join – we want to add to these as well to make them super useful. I’m sure there are a few other datasets that people would like to be made available and built for them.

So if you’re a HTML/CSS/JS ninja, an ObjectiveC or Java rockstar, or a Flash-meister then join the Folia Developers group, tell us what you know, what you need and what you want to build!

New Folia Gardening Widgets now Available!

2010-05-02T04:26:00.000-07:00

Loading Folia gardener badge...

Hi all – this weekend, we released some brand new Folia widgets !

There are currently two to choose from:

Folia Badge: Shows your profile pic and your current planting / stash counts.

Folia Latest Plantings: Shows your badge + your 5 most recent plantings.

For anyone using the old Clearspring widgets: the new widgets completely replace the old ones, so if you still have them installed you’ll see a message letting you know about the change and what to do. The reason why we have removed the old ones completely is that Clearspring recently sold up and have shut down support for their widget creation tool, so we cannot support them any longer. It was a good motivation to start looking into developing our own – we think they look much better than the old ones, and we’ll be able to develop them much further in the future.

The installation steps are now a whole lot easier too (so no more weird multi-step help pages for our widgets – yay!):

Go to the widgets page
Copy the code under the “To install this widget” heading (it should already be personalised to your gardener name)
Paste this code into your html editor tool of choice.

The way we have developed these widgets means that if you know a bit of css, you can customise your widget in anyway you want – you can override the styles on your own page, or you could download the js file, host it yourself and switch the stylesheet reference over. We’re cool with whatever you’d like to do with these widgets – and we’d love to see what you come up with!

Newsletter enhancements: Your neighbours and local folia groups

2010-04-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

Hi all – we made a couple of little enhancements to the newsletters for this week: you’ll now find a new section called “In Your Local Area”.

This section will now show you:

What is currently sprouting, transplanting and being harvested in your region
Recommended gardeners near you that you might like to follow
New gardeners in your area that you might like to follow and welcome to the site
Your nearest local folia gardening groups that you might like to join

Hopefully this should encourage a bit of neighbourly folian following!

Let us know what you think!

New Seed Swapper Badges!

2010-04-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

Some of you may of noticed a couple of new badges appearing on gardener profiles at the beginning of the week – this was the first little step in rolling out the first of our badges for seed swapping.

Basically, this means that if anyone completes a registered swap on Folia this will count towards the following badges:

First Swap – the first seed / plant swap you successfully carry out on Folia
Seed Swapper x 10 – for sending 10 swaps
Seed Swapper x 30 – for sending 30 swaps
Seed Swapper x 100 – for sending 100 swaps

All historical swaps before now have been calculated and badges awarded. From here, you’ll instantly be awarded the badge once you have reached the threshold and this achievement will be listed in your activity and your follower’s activity. You’ll also get a nice little email just in case you’ve missed all that other action ;)

Along with this, you’ll now notice that all of your existing badges on your dashboard and profile pages are now hooked up to badge pages explaining how they were earned, and who else has also achieved the same badge.

Furthermore, we now have a nice little leaderboard of seed swappers for 2010 and for all time to encourage a little bit of friendly competition :) I think we have ourselves a challenge: let’s get swapping!

New: Plant Planting Schedules (For both hemispheres!)

2010-03-14T03:45:00.001-07:00

Hi all - we've been doing a bit of number crunching at Folia HQ this week, and have released a new little feature on the plant pages to let you see what we are working on.

If you take a wander over to one of the more popular plants (Tomato is always a good example) you'll now see two timelines appear - one for the southern hemisphere, and one for the northern. Basically, we've now got a calculation that runs every week that tallies up all of your journal observations (sow, transplant and harvest), finds the most common months for each, and then splits this tally based on which hemisphere the observation was made in.

We are currently only doing this calculation for plants with over 20 observations per event to make sure that the end result is as accurate as it can be - so this timeline will only currently appear on the most popular plants (which is around 300 or so different species). Hopefully, as more observations are logged we'll have more plants displaying calculated timelines - so remember to log as much and as accurately as you can!

Next step is to look at rolling this down to your plantings - so when you add a new planting or stash item and classify it, we'll be able to calculate a starting schedule for you. Eventually, the plan is to keep segmenting the data and give you a more accurate, more localised version of this schedule (exciting stuff!)

As usual, let us know what you think and how we can make it better!

New Feature: Yearly Seed Planning Schedules

2010-01-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

The major new feature in today’s release is the Seed Planning Schedule that you’ll now find appearing on your Seed Stash pages – this feature should hopefully make planning when to plant and when to harvest a whole lot easier!

I’ve been working on updating my list today – so take a look at my Seed Stash for a bit of an example of how it works:

Nic’s Seed Stash page

Nic’s Broad Bean ‘Bunyards Exhibition’

How does it work?
Over on your Stash List, you’ll now see a little row of grey boxes under each of your stash items – this is your individual schedule that you can edit to list the sowing, transplanting and harvest / blooming months. To edit, go to your Stash Edit page and scroll down a bit until you see the Planting Schedule section. Check the boxes of the months for each one, then Save your Stash Item and it should magically appear on your schedule bar.

This is a Supporter feature (non Supporters will be able to see the schedule bars to get a feel for how they work but don’t have the ability to edit). Supporters keep Folia going by helping to pay for our server hosting costs: for more information about Supporter Features take a wander over to your Upgrade Account page.

Handy dandy links

If you need some help with getting started with this feature: Help!

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

If you have any ideas on how we can make this feature even better: Suggestions & Feedback

Happy new year - and a engine upgrade for folia!

2010-01-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

Hi all – a very happy new year to everyone, here’s hoping that this gardening year is even bigger and better than the last!

Nath and I have been busy working on a major behind the scenes update to the underlying technology running the site, which we finally released today. This means you should experience a speedier, more efficient site from now on, and it also means that we have a much more powerful set of tools to develop future functionality.

This being quite a massive change, the biggest part of this job involved a lot of testing and retesting. We think we’ve covered hopefully everything on the site, but it would be great if everyone could keep their eyes peeled for anything that looks or acts a bit strange and let us know in the Bugs & Issues group. We’re on bug fixing duty for the rest of the week, so hopefully with everyone’s help we’ll get any bumpiness ironed out pretty promptly.

For anyone interested in the techie explanation: We’ve updated to Rails version 2.3.5 (we were previously on 2.1.1, which was as old as the hills in tech years!) and upgraded a whole heap of gems that are in common use on folia. The biggest driver for this change was that we needed the oAuth integration mechanisms so that we could start work on developing login and other functionality using FB and other oAuth providers like gmail, yahoo! and twitter. It also paves the way for bigger plans such as mobile versions of the site.

We’ve also got a couple of new features that we managed to include in this major release that we’ll be announcing soon (or as usual, someone will find it and announce for us in the meantime!)

..and the 2009 Folia Faire winners are...

2009-12-06T02:40:00.000-08:00

We’ve just announced the 2009 Folia Faire winners over on the Faire page – many congratulations to all recipients, we think that all awards are much deserved!

This year, we decided to split the nomination and voting process into a public vote, and also a set of awards decided by a committee. The commitee for 2009 was comprised of 9 folians, hopefully representing a good cross section of the folia community: ceae, kristiecav, cmagnus, graibeard, janietta, Katxena, kelly, SneIrish and whirliegig.

Much thanks goes to our committee members for this year for their careful and methodical consideration of award recipients – they did a marvelous job, so much so that we will make the committee awards a regular fixture for future faires. We will choose a different committee for each year, to make sure that as many as possible can participate in the judging.

We’ll be making contact with each winner over the next couple of days, but you’ll start seeing your winner badges appearing on your profiles / homepages very soon – so look out for them over the coming weekend!

Last chance to vote in the 2009 Folia Faire awards!

2009-11-28T10:13:00.000-08:00

As we are sadly coming to the end of Folia Faire month, we are also coming to the end of the voting period too – so if you haven’t voted yet, this weekend is your last chance to do so!

Folia Faire 2009 Voting page

We’ll be officially ending the voting on Monday and tallying up the winners – so stay tuned for the big winners announcement next week!

Vote now in the 2009 folia faire awards!

2009-11-12T11:28:00.000-08:00

After a couple of late nights getting the nominations sorted from your fabulous suggestions, the voting page for the 2009 folia faire is finally now up and running!

Voting page for the 2009 Folia Faire

Voting will be open until the last week of November, so you have plenty of time to decide on your favourites – if you missed the deadline for nominations and would like to nominate someone else for each category, you can via the “other” field (just make sure it’s a link to a folia page, or it won’t be counted in the final tally!)

Voting is open to all, so feel free to post this link around the interweb, facebook and tweet as much as you like.

Happy voting!

Nominations for the Folia Faire now open!

2009-10-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of days we’ve been busy finalising and announcing the categories for the first annual Folia Faire – so please let us know for each category who you’d like to nominate for each award. Nominations received will be then factored into a voting round that will happen during November – stay tuned for updates!

So, without any further ado, the categories are:

Best Garden 2009

Most Creative Garden 2009

Best Exotic / Rare Planting 2009

Houseplant of the Year 2009

The Gigantic Veg Award 2009

Leap Into Gardening! Award 2009

Best Garden Design / Plan 2009

Best Creature Feature 2009

Best Grown Fruit / Vegetable of the Year 2009

Seed Saver Award 2009

Best Journal Entry 2009

The Winter Sowing Award 2009

Beautiful Bloom Award 2009

Best Recycling / Repurposing Idea 2009

In addition there will be a series of awards that will be calculated (most harvests, most journals etc.) that will be announced in November – so you still have a bit of time to get your journals and harvests logged!

We really want to make sure that we have enough categories to cover all different types of gardens and gardeners, so if you think we’re missing a category then let us know as might be able to squeeze in a couple more…

Happy nominating!

New Feature: Batch updating on your Seed Stash Lists!

2009-10-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

As some of you have already discovered ;), we released some new features for Seed Stash over the weekend that will hopefully make it much easier to mark stash items as archived and available for swap.

If you are a Supporter, you’ll now see a checkbox on the left of every item in your stash list, and a checkbox above the heading of your list for quickly marking all items on the page.
After you’ve marked the stash items you’d like to archive / unarchive / make available for swap, scroll down and select the option in the dropdown list, click the button and hey presto! you’ve just done your first batch update of your stash! How exciting was that?

Let us know what you think about this new feature – we’d love to start expanding it out to the planting lists too if everyone thinks that this is a good feature to have. Let us also know about what other batch features you might like to see for your stash and planting lists (oh yeah, and wish-lists too I guess while we are at it!)

Handy dandy links

If you need some help with new batch update feature on stash: 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

Announcing the 2009 Folia Faire!

2009-10-10T01:17:00.000-07:00

We thought it was high time that we organised something that celebrated and recognised all the amazing things that happen on folia – so we’re officially going to have the inaugural Folia Village Faire in November, and we need your help to start organising it!

What we’re thinking is just like a village faire, we have a competition with categories that everyone can enter. Think categories like “biggest pumpkin”, “Weirdest shaped vegetable”, “Most perfect tomato”, “Most beautiful bloom”, “Most creative growing container”…you get the idea :) Quirky is great, but more serious categories are welcome too.

Categories can be suggested by everyone over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll then shortlist the ones we like the best.

We’ll then call for entries for each category, and everyone can cast their vote during a set period in November. We’ll do a big announcement and a newsletter to let everyone know when to vote – entries will be need to be anything grown / done within the last 12 months: meaning October 08 – November 09. This should hopefully cover everyone in both hemispheres equally.

After the voting period, the results will be tallied and we’ll declare the winners who will all get some marvelous badges to show off on their profiles / websites / blogs, and we’ll also giveaway some free memberships, stickers, badges and whatever else we can find for certain categories.

We’ll also be contacting some companies to see if they’d like to offer any fabulous prizes – if you know of a company that might be interested in getting involved (in exchange for advertising perhaps?) we’d love you to let us know about it!

So, we’ve got the best part of the month to start getting this happening – as with everything around here, if you have any suggestions on how we can organise this or if you’d like to volunteer as a faire helper let us know!

I’ll create a group for the Faire in the next couple of days so we have a place to start organising…watch this space!

Edit: The Folia Faire group is now open for business – please come along and join!

Folia Plant Wiki now Creative Commons

2009-07-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

From this week, the Folia Plant wiki is now officially under a Creative Commons license.

What does this mean?

We’ve chosen to license our data as a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA), which means that we are open to anyone reusing and remixing our plant wiki data as long as they attribute us and also open up their own data in the same way. From the Creative Commons site, the official definition is:

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

We are hoping that this move encourages more sharing of gardening data in the online community in general and that it represents how strongly we feel that the wiki should remain a public and open resource to all.

What does this mean for Folia?

You’ll now notice that all plant and variety pages now display the license logo to indicate that these pages are BY-SA. In terms of benefits to Folia, this new license means that we have more flexibility when it comes to remixing other sources of data out in the interweb. Wikipedia have only just recently announced their adoption of the same license, so by invoking our “Share Alike” we now have the ability to source data directly from Wikipedia (and if you are a Wikipedia editor, then you can also start to source directly from us)!

We’ll shortly start a topic in the Wiki Group to start listing sites with the same license – if you know of any sites, feel free to contribute to this thread. If you have an interest in the Plant Wiki, please feel free to join the group!

So, what do you think?

We’d love to hear what you think about the new licensing, and if you have any questions at all about what this means for Folia – ask away!

Look! We have new tabs!

2009-07-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-07T09:27:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

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!)

2009-05-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

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

Reviews of Folia on Treehugger & Planet Green

2009-05-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

We've had a bit of folia love this week with two lovely reviews on Treehugger and Planet Green - here's a bit of what they said about us:

Folia provides a user-friendly dashboard tool to help users know what plants are being sown and harvested, as well as weather forecasts, seed organizing, and photo organizing so that your garden can grow at its best...Folia's cool webtool helps you get all your seeds in a row - from listing chores to tracking frosts, researching sowing and harvesting timing to tracking observations about your garden.

Nice stuff, hey?

Sprouting, transplanting and harvest / bloom estimates for your timeline!

2009-04-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

This one is a pretty exciting update for us – we’ve been waiting aaaages to implement this, but we’ve had to wait for enough data goodness to be entered into the system to make this work properly.

You’ll now find that your growing timelines have been shifted to the left slightly to show more of your future dates. This is because we are now displaying calculated estimated dates for sprouting, transplanting and harvest / bloom for each of your plantings. This data is being calculated from every one of the milestones that are being logged in the system for the variety that you grow – so it’s real info from real gardeners, not estimated dates from the back of random seed packets. This data will start becoming more accurate the more observations we have in the system – so remember to log all of your observations so that the data keeps getting better for everyone (and remember to classify all of your plantings too!) For an example, check out MattMiddleton’s fab timeline.

Over on the wiki page we’ve also added more detail to the planting estimates too – you’ll be able to see min / max and average days for germination, transplant and harvest days too. You’ll find these new estimates under the “How long does it take to grow?” heading on the plant and variety wiki pages. Check out Tomato for an example

The estimates are really wrong for my plant, how can I fix them?

Because we know this system isn’t going to be perfect all the time, we’ve also created a way for you to override the data in the system with your own. You’ll find three new fields on your planting edit page that will let you tweak the days between sprouting, transplanting and harvest for just your own plantings (this data doesn’t save back to the wiki, it's completely yours to use).

My timeline says my dahlia is ready for harvest – huh?

We’ve added some logic to check what sort of plant you have and we show either a bloom icon if it is a flower, or a harvest icon if it is fruit / vegetable. If you’re seeing a harvest icon for your flowers, edit the wiki page for that plant and set the Category field to Flower.

Timeline estimates are currently a Supporter feature only – Supporters help us pay for hosting costs for the site, and allow us to create more spanky features like this one!

Handy dandy links:

If you need some help with the new estimate feature: 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

A-Z for your stash lists, Journal share link, new widget tab

2009-04-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

Hey all – another week, another set of new features and goodies! So what’s new this week?

A-Z filters for your Stash Lists

Following on from last week’s A-Z on your plantings, for Supporters we’ve also now added A-Z filtering on your stash lists to make it easier to quickly find your stash items.

New look gardener profile page

We’ve also tidied up everyone’s home pages to make them a little clearer, and make functions like “add as a gardening buddy” a little easier to find. Check out Dee’s new look home page for an example!

Profile widget tab

Over in your profile settings page, you’ll find a new tab called Widgets – you’ll find a couple of widgets, blog badges and example email signature code – all personalised and ready to copy and paste.

Invite-o-matic

We’ve also made the Invite-a-friend link a permanent fixture on your top header bar (in the top right of the page) If you haven’t used it yet, give it a whirl and send an invite or two! If they join up from your invite emails, you’ll get a message in your folia mail and they’ll get a little “invited by” link in their profile with your username. Woo!

New Journals Share link

On every journal, you’ll now find a silver little Share button that will let you quickly bookmark or share the journal on lots of different networks and sites. So, if you do read an great journal on your travels around the site, remember that you can now email, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Digg it (to name a couple).

Some handy dandy links:

If you need some help with the new A-Z stash lists or widget pages: 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

Photobucket is here!

2009-04-13T04:14:00.000-07:00

Yep, after quite a bit of struggling with the API, we’ve finally added Photobucket to our photo hosting options, alongside Picasa / Blogger & Flickr. Woo!

What’s Photobucket?

Photobucket is a site much like flickr and picasa that stores your photos. It’s also free – to get a free account you can sign up here.

How do I connect up my Photobucket account?

Take a mosey on over to your (hugely improved) photo account page and select “Photobucket” from the dropdown list. Copy and paste your entire Photobucket URL into the textbox and you’re away! We’ve got a new Photobucket Help page that will give you some pointers if you get stuck (it’s got some handy screenshots too)

When are you going to let me upload my photos directly to the site?

We’re still not in a position where we can offer direct photo uploading to the site as we still have to be frugal with our bandwidth. We are also of the belief that these sites host photos much better and with more features than we will ever be able to provide – and it means that your photos are not locked to our site, you can use them where ever you like. Flickr and Photobucket have great little photo upload programs that can be downloaded to your desktop, so if you aren’t a big user of photo sites you can just upload from your desktop and start journaling on folia.

XP Photobucket Uploader

FTP uploading

Firefox Add-on for Photobucket

Photobucket uploading tutorials

Hmmm, it doesn’t seem to be working for me…

It’s definitely very very beta – we are definitely anticipating that there might be some teething problems with this option to begin with, just as we had with flickr and picasa. If you are having trouble connecting your Photobucket account, firstly take a look at the Photobucket Help page to see if we’ve covered your problem already, then ask us in one of the groups below:

If you need some help connecting up your account: Help!

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

If you have any ideas to make this better: Suggestions & Feedback

Your new Growing Timeline page & some more new icons!

2009-03-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

We were going to release this on the weekend, but we had to do some server tweaking this morning and thought we might as well pop these changes up for you all to start playing with! Aren’t you all spoilt this week, hey?

On your Dashboard you’ll find that your growing timeline heading has now mysteriously turned itself into a link. If you click the link, you’ll now get taken to your brand spankin’ new timeline page! This page shows lots more weeks “at a glance” and increases the number of plantings you can see to 30. Best of all, your timeline is now fully public – so you can link to your timeline like this ( http://myfolia.com/gardener/nic/timeline ). Likewise, you can now see have a sticky beak at other gardener’s timelines and see what they’ve been up to lately. This is a feature for our lovely Supporters – they help us to keep the site up and running. If you aren’t a Supporter yet, take a look at your Become a Supporter! page for details.

Added to that, we’ve also added three new timeline icons: Potting Up / Repotted, Treating and Fertilising. These icons are available to all – so use as much as you please! More icons are coming as fast as I can make them up!

New timeline icons, swaps home page & more!

2009-03-28T10:23:00.001-07:00

Thought we might announce the latest round of changes to the site that we made this morning:

New Swaps home page

The swaps page has now finally been returned to the top menu as it’s had a bit of a makeover – you’ll find the latest swap map, lists of recent swaps that have occurred between folians, latest available plants and seeds for swap, and easier-to-get-at swap labels for your swapping pleasure. Swappalicious!

New timeline icons

You’ll also notice that your timelines are looking slightly different from today – we’ve done some work on refining some of the icons and added a couple of new ones – Sown and Showing True Leaves. We’re going to start adding some more over the coming weeks – so you can collect the whole set ;)

Garden page redesign

We’ve been doing an absolute ton of work in the back-end to get the gardens working faster and better-er. We’ve also given this page a bit of a redesign as well and kicked out a couple of annoying bugs in the process.
You’ll also now find that gardens now have “friendly urls” so that they look like this: http://myfolia.com/gardens/136-allotment-fruit-and-flower-garden

For Supporters, you’ll also find a new tab called “Tasks” on your garden page. I think you guys might be able to figure out what that’s all about :)

Local Activity tab

As a Supporter prezzie this week – we’ve rolled out a new tab on your activity page that shows you what gardeners in your local area are up to. You can filter by what is being sown, harvested, fruiting…you name it. If you want to consider becoming a Supporter – it helps us with paying for the costs of keeping folia up and running. To find out more take a look at your Become a Supporter! page

As usual, let us know what you think!

Multi-planting journaling is here!

2009-03-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

Recently, we released a fabulous new feature to the site - the ability to journal about multiple plantings and gardens in a single journal entry. We've been flat-out with fixes, improvements and enhancements on this feature for the last couple of weeks, but now we are finally ready to announce it to everyone!

So, how does it work?

Before, a journal was linked to only one of your garden "things" - so it was either a journal about one of your plantings, or a journal about one of your gardens. We've totally rejigged the way journals work in the backend so now journals can be linked to multiple things. So, you can journal simultanously about your backyard garden, your windowsill garden and your 4 basil plantings. There is no limit to the number of items you can link to your journals - so it gives everyone much more flexibility as to how they want to organise their gardening journal.

Let's see an example!

Okay, so on your journal page you'll now find a big search box that will find all of your gardens and plantings. Type a couple of characters, and a list of possible matches will appear. Select the item you want to add to your journal and it will appear in your "journal items" list.

After you've added your plantings and gardens to your journal item list, you can then assign events to each - these events will appear as milestones on your growing timelines. You'll also see a day counter appear next to each - so you can see for each item in your journal precisely how old each planting was when the event happened.

So, if you haven't been in for a while, give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

We're updating the site!

2009-03-13T03:06:00.000-07:00

We are now releasing some huge changes to the site - this one is a biggie, so we are estimating downtime of around 1-2 hours. We might be up a bit earlier than that, but we'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, you can check out some of our changes already - we've got a revamped holding page featuring our twitter feed and (of course) the sudoku.

We'll be updating our twitter as we go, so if you'd like to follow us: www.twitter.com/myfolia

Update: We're back up and running as at 13:20 GMT! What an exhausting day - we'll blog and twitter about the changes very soon

Experiencing a little bit of unexpected downtime...

2009-03-10T16:09:00.001-07:00

Sorry about the downtime - we're working on getting the site back up and running right now.
We'll update our twitter (http://twitter.com/myfolia) as we go, but hopefully won't be too long.

Performance enhancements, more stash options and personal journal search

2009-02-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

This week at Folia HQ we've been mainly working on a heap of performance tuning to make sure we get through the busy springtime. There isn't many visible changes this week I'm afraid, but we did manage to sneak in a couple of little goodies:

More options to describe your stash

Om suggested a couple of other options for seed stash (Corms, Sets, Roots & Pods) that we've added to the system - you'll now find the new options on your Add Stash and Edit Stash pages.

New search box for your journal page

Supporters will find a shiny new journal search box on their journal home page. Woo! This one was suggested by a couple of people: nax , Merelymel13 and Armorel

Blistering fast Grapevine

Nath would also like to add that he has suped up the Grapevine to a blistering speed - so no more waiting around for your grapevine fix!

Hope you like, and remember if you have any suggestions for the site, we'd love you to add them to our Suggestions & Feedback group.

Group your Planting Lists by Lifecycle Type, Genus and More!

2009-02-15T05:36:00.000-08:00

You may have already noticed a couple of new links at the top of your Planting & Stash lists – these links can now be used to group your lists in a couple of different (and exciting!) ways. The grouping uses data from the plant wiki to determine lifecycle types and categories, so jump in and edit the wiki to get your plant list grouping. It will also only work on plantings that have been classified, so get in there and start classifying your plantings!

The options are pretty self explanatory, but to give you some examples from my own lists, you can now:

Group by Genus: This will display your list grouped by each genus your plants belong to. See my list for an example.

Group by Lifecycle Type: This will group your list based on the lifecycle of each planting (Annual, Perennial etc.) See my list for an example

Group by Category: This will group your plantings based on the plant category (Vegetable, Herb, Succulent, Tree etc.) See my list for an example

These features are at present only available to our Supporters – our fantastic Supporters help us to pay for hosting costs to keep the site going. If you want to find out more about becoming a Supporter, visit our Supporter Page!

Getting organised for gardening

2009-02-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

Hey There!

We've spent the last week or so completely re-writing the garden task page with a brand spankin’ new layout and funky new features.

So the task page will look a bit different, now you can complete a task directly from that page. You can now repeat tasks that need doing more than once – like weeding, watering and fertilising whilst still assigning it to a plant or garden. And when you complete a repeating task it will create a new task in the future based on the repeating rules you’ve entered! Woohoo!

For our lovely supporters, we’ve also added a whole bunch of ways to export tasks into your other devices and programs, like RSS feeds, CSV and iCalendar. So you can have tasks anywhere you need to see them! These export links are special so that only you can see them and means that you can still access your private folia stuff without actually having to log in to folia.

Now the caveats and known issues. For some reason the person who wrote the icalendar exporter kinda stuffed up the recurring task bit. So if you subscribe to your icalendar tasks then the recurring ones will only show the first task only not the subsequent recurring ones. But I’m looking into that one and should have it fixed soon. The iCalendar has only really been tested using iCal on a Mac so please feel free to drop it into Outlook, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Mozilla Sunbird and see how it works :)

Tagging for your Gardens

2009-01-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

A brand new feature from last week’s release is…tagging for your gardens! This means you can now categorise your gardens as much or as little as you like.

You’ll find a new field on your Add Garden and Edit Garden pages called “Categories” in which you can enter your category names (separate by spaces). Popular tags will now appear on the Garden Home Page so you’ll be able to find other gardeners that have categorised their gardens in the same way as you.

You’ll notice that for the meantime you’ll still have to classify by the existing garden types as well – we’ll be phasing this one out slowly and will eventually turn this into a primary category tag for your garden (you won’t have to change anything, it will all happen automatically).

Enjoy!

Improvements to Variety & Plant pages - Sortable lists, new wiki fields and more

2009-01-18T03:12:00.000-08:00

As part of the latest round of changes, we’ve done a lot of work restructuring the variety areas of the site to make it easier to locate plantings and swappables.

You’ll now find every variety list per plant is now fully sortable – so you can sort by popularity, days to germinate, hybrid / heirloom and more. Check out the Tomato variety list for a great example.
Open-Pollinated has been added to the wiki, so varieties can now be marked as any combination of Hybrid, Heirloom and OP.
Planting lists are now sortable as well – by name, gardener, happiness, date planted and location (nearest to you!)
Swappable lists have also had a bit of sortable goodness added – name, gardener, location are all now fully sortable. You’ll also find on the Stashed page that you can send a swap request if the gardener has marked as available for swap.
We’ve also done a bit of restructuring work to get some nice friendly URLs in place – so now you’ll see links like this: http://myfolia.com/plants/10-tomato/varieties/29-brandywine instead of the old variety links (both are compatible with the site, so if you’ve linked to a variety page out in the interweb it will still work fine)

Hope you like the changes!

If you haven't yet received an activation email....

2008-12-17T09:05:00.001-08:00

Hey all - we've just discovered that our email server is refusing to send out some of your activation emails. Just to make the problem worse, it's also been withholding emails sent using the "contact us" form as well. We're really sorry about this, we haven't been ignoring your emails - promise!

We're sorting out that issue now and should have them resent out soon, but for the meantime if you really want in - drop us a quick message directly and I'll give you your activation code pronto. Email address is hello (put a little at sign here instead of this bit) myfolia.com.

Update: All activations should now be sent out - if you haven't yet received yours, send us an email and we'll sort it all out for you :)

New look home pages & revamped dashboards

2008-12-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

As a little early christmas pressie to you all, we thought we'd roll out a couple of the changes we've been busy working on lately. Hope you enjoy!

New Look Home Page, Gardens & Plants Pages

We've completely overhauled the home, gardens, plants and gardener pages to highlight more features from around the site. Whilst working on this feature we were continuously amazed at the number of absolutely beautiful photographs we have linked within the site, so we've tried to showcase them in a more of a browsable, magazine-like way. They are now displayed randomly too - so hopefully you'll stumble across some wonderful gardens that you haven't yet discovered. It all adds to the serendipitous nature of folia!

Revamped Dashboards

Login in and check out the changes to your gardener dashboards - you'll find it much more orderly and widgety (and ready for more changes in that direction!) You can hide and show panels as you need them, and you'll also find that your frost dates are now displayed prominently on your planting timeline.

We're still working on a heap of new exciting changes during the winter - we'll be releasing bits and pieces as we go, so keep your eyes peeled and keep your awesome suggestions coming!

HOWTO: Twitter your Gardening Journal Automatically

2008-11-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

Here at Folia, we like to make sure that we aren’t developing things have already been developed nicely elsewhere already. It means that we can concentrate on developing more gardening specific goodness for you all.

One of the things that we’ve often put on our to-do list is automatic synchronisation of your gardener journal to blogs and twitter. We’ve never quite got there with this functionality, as it has required a whole lot of thinking around secure authentication of your details between folia and twitter (whilst trying to avoid naughty Password Anti-Patterns)

I’ve been trialling a service called TwitterFeed which has only just come out of beta – it handles all of the password stuff that we didn’t want to and works quite nicely. It’s really simple to set up and it’s free, so I thought it was worth a post to let you all know about it. Once it’s set up, you don’t have to even think about it again – it all happens in the background for you. I almost completely even forgot I was testing this out it’s so invisible ;)

To see it in action, you can check out my folia feed twitter account right here: http://twitter.com/folia_nic (and if you want to follow me – or Folia, that would be cool too!)

p.s. Your Folia Gardener Journal RSS is in the format of http://myfolia.com/gardener/[gardener_name].rss – so my RSS feed is http://myfolia.com/gardener/nic.rss (An easier way of finding it with less mucking about is to navigate to your journal page and click on the little orange icon in the top right corner of the page)

New Features: Planting Timelines, What's Planting Now? & Dashboard Redesign

2008-09-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

We've got some huge changes to the site to announce this week - so much so that we needed to break it down in sub headers!

Planting Timelines
You can now mark your planting events on your very own gardening timeline, so you can see visually how long your plant took to sprout, harvest or bloom. The timeline is displayed on your newly redesigned Dashboard page.

What's Planting Now
Check out what's Sowing, Transplanting and Harvesting right now in your local area with your "What's Planting" box - this is calculated from all planting events from every gardener around you and should give you a good idea on things to plant and if your own plantings are on schedule.

Improved Dashboard Goodness
We've completely overhauled your gardener homepage to make it much easier to get up-and-running with, add new plants to your garden and change your profile and weather settings.

Going live with some huuuuge changes!

2008-09-30T02:20:00.000-07:00

We're going to be rolling out some great changes to the site today - we've been working on this release for a while, and there are some really really great changes in this one. We'll be putting up the sudoku at 10:30 BST and expect about 30 minutes of downtime - we'll keep updating our twitter account (http://twitter.com/myfolia) as we go so you can play along at home :)

Server Shenanigans This Morning

2008-09-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

Our hosting provider has had some issues with our server this morning. They are currently in the process of moving us across to a new server. We'll keep you updated on our twitter as we go - but we shouldn't hopefully be too much longer.

All data is safe and accounted for.

UPDATE: we are now completely back up and running on a shiny new box - apparently the memory server was the issue and Slicehost had to move everyone from the effected servers. Many thanks to the Slicehost guys for keeping us updated and getting us back online so quickly :)

New Journal Layouts & Quick Add Events!

2008-09-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

As part of our update this week we’ve released a couple of nice changes to your journals page:

Pick’n’Mix Journal Styles

We now have 3 journal styles to choose from: Blog (the original), Day and List style. So now you can set your journal view to fit best with the type of garden journaling you do – from our twitterers to our novelists :) You’ll find a couple of buttons to change your journal style on the right hand side of your main journal page (click the Journal tab on your home page to get to the right page)

We’ve also given you a little bit more flexibility on how you’d like your journal to appear to others. You can, for instance, now set your personal journal view to “list” for easy viewing and editing whilst setting the folian view to the blog one. So, go have a play around with all the options ‘til you’re happy :)

Quick Add Journal Events

Another new feature is our “quick add journal” box that will appear at the top of your journals page. This is great to use when you have a couple of quick event updates to add in - you’ll now be done in a jiffy (also click on the weather section to see some funky weather changing feature goodness – Nic’s quite proud of her effort on that one!)

Anyway – let us know what you think about the changes!

Releasing new stuff - we'll be offline for 20 mins UPDATED

2008-09-09T01:51:00.000-07:00

We're just in the process of releasing some brand new features to the site - this one is a bit of a biggie, so we'll be offline for approx. 20 mins. We'll update as we go on Twitter :)

Update: Back up-and-running with some new features - we'll announce all the new stuff very soon...alternatively you can as usual begin to guess what they are instead ;)

Folia Street Team - A Grass Roots Campaign!

2008-08-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

Last week we finally launched the new Street Team page . Woo hoo!

The page includes the fabulous PDF flyers designed by cmagnus and one that we whipped up a while back, along with some ideas on good places (to ask) to put these flyers up around your local area. Let us know if you do get some (or see some) out-and-about :)

If anyone else wants to create some localised / translated / just a bit different-ised versions, we’d be tickled pink! Send ‘em though to us! (preferably as PDF, but if you are having trouble converting we can help you out)

Go Team Go!

Search Index Maintenance

2008-08-07T02:45:00.000-07:00

We're currently offline doing some maintenance on our search index. There's quite a bit of data so is taking a little longer than expected.

Improved Journal Features - auto happiness updating & more events!

2008-07-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Okay – this is the last announcement from last week’s changes – it’s now taken over a week to announce everything! Phew!

The final one, which many of you have probably already noticed by now, is a couple of small enhancements to the Add a Journal Entry page :

We’ve added a couple of new options to journal events – some of the new events are: Pruning, Branching, Treating, Fertilising and Moved (which will also let you select the new garden it’s been moved into at the same time!)
Plant Happiness is now able to be updated from the journal page – if you select “Happy” then the plant will also be automatically updated to reflect the latest happiness (supporter only at this stage)

Export your Planting Data to Excel

2008-07-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

Another day, another feature (well okay, the feature was already there yesterday - but I thought I would split up the announcements this week since we have so many new features!)

On your plantings page, next to the "printable version" link there is also a link to download your planting list as an Excel file for your own backups. We'll be adding more data to this file over time - milestones is on the list, but if you can think of any other handy data to add let us know :)

This feature is only available to Supporters (it's actually a bit like Supporter Christmas this week). If you want to find out more about becoming a Supporter, go take a look at our Supporter page.

Printable Planting Lists

2008-07-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

Our second big feature for this week is printable planting lists - your planting page is now printer friendly so you can quickly grab a printout of everything in your garden and not waste all the green and brown ink in your printer ;)

If you are a Folia Supporter, you'll find a link at the top of your plants page (e.g. My Plants page) called "Printable Version" that will automagically create a printable version of the page for you. (If you aren't a Supporter - this feature is still available, just select print from your browser menu) From there, all you'll have to do is send it to your printer and you're done!

(We'll be also working on making Wish List pages and Journal pages print-ified in the same way very soon.)

Calendar View now available for your Journals

2008-07-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

Yay! We now have a calendar view on all Supporter's Journals! So, if you are a Supporter, you'll now find a calendar on the right hand panel that will transport you forward and backward in time (in the garden journaling dimension, that is)

You can take it for a spin here over in Nic's Journal and check out what she was doing on the 10th of June, 2008... or strap yourself in and go right back in time to 30th May, 2007 (remember to not step on any bugs or meet your grandmother on the way.)

This feature is only available for our lovely, fantastic Supporters. If you think you might be interested in becoming one, take a wander over to our Become a Supporter! page to peruse all of the lovely features we have built so far. Remember that the more supporters we have, the more features we can develop for everyone! (Did we also mention it's as cheap as chips?)

Folia T Shirts Are Go!

2008-07-11T01:35:00.001-07:00

We now have both sides of the Atlantic covered for folia tees - Folia Store Europe & Folia Store North America are now open for business!

We've made sure that all of our tees are super customisable, so go crazy adding your own slogans to the back! We've got pretty much every colour covered too (we are a big fan of the hot pink number ourselves) and we've got the organic, free trade, free range options available too.

So, get 'em while they're hot!

Brand New Home Page & More Groups Goodness!

2008-07-03T10:42:00.001-07:00

Today we launched a brand spankin' new version of the home page - we've added more featured journals to the page, along with a new recently updated plantings panel and latest talk from the groups. We think it's a vast improvement on the old one, and we hope you like it!

On a similar note, we also revamped the groups pages this week - we've added some slidey magic to make browsing through your groups a breeze, and also improved the layout to highlight recent topics in each group.

So check out the changes and let us know what you think!

New Stuff This Week!

2008-06-17T02:23:00.000-07:00

A little late in announcing the changes this week due to our little trip to the Birmingham NEC, but better late than never:

So what's new this week?

RSS Feeds for Personal Gardening Journals
We have (finally!) rolled out the first of our gardener RSS feeds - so you can now follow the adventures of your favourite folians in the comfort of your very own feed reader. To find the RSS feed, look out for the orange RSS button in the top right hand corner of the gardener pages.

Retailer Pages
You'll now notice that your retailers are now in fully hyperlinked glory - you can now find out who else is growing plants from the same little nursery, garden centre or market stall that you bought it from. Check out Johnny's Seeds for a great example.

Improved Plant Classifier
We've added some tweaks here and there to improve the plant classifier - it should be even easier to find your plant now.

Groups Recommender
We've also added a little bit of magic to the groups pages to highlight groups that we think you might be interested in - check out the right side panel on the Groups home page for your own personal recommendations.

My Profiles on Other Sites
Over on your profile edit page, you'll now find some extra options to let folians know who you are on other sites.

..and the usual little surprises around the site that we'll leave you all to find!

Road Trip 2008 - First Stop BBC Gardeners World!

2008-06-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

We’re going on a mini road trip to spread the MyFolia word and our first stop is BBC Gardeners World Live! We’ll be up there on the Saturday (14th June) wandering around, showing off our spanky new MyFolia shirts, handing out a few bits and bobs and generally getting the word out about the site.So if you’re going, look out for us - you can’t miss us - and come say hello. We’d love to meet you!

Experiencing a little bit of downtime tonight...

2008-06-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

Sorry about the downtime we've had tonight, we are currently sorting through some server space
issues with our hosting provider. We are completely on the case, and we'll keep you updated as we go.

p.s. All of your garden data is absolutely, completely safe and sound.

Update: We've almost sorted the issues out - we'll be up (and stable) quite soon. We might be a little up-and-down over the next couple of minutes. Hold tight!

Update 2: We are back up and running!

Hello Kim Komando Show fans!

2008-06-04T09:03:00.000-07:00

The site is currently running very hot today as we have been featured as Cool Site of the Day on the The Kim Komando Show!

We’d just like to let everyone know that we are working like busy bees to keep the site up and running with the increased traffic – I think we are doing quite well so far, but we will be keeping a very close eye on things today to keep everything running smoothly.

Anyway – we’d like to say a big welcome to all our brand new gardeners. Hope you like the site!

Crowd source your green thumb with Folia - CNET Review

2008-06-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

We've just got a fantastic review from Webware (CNET):

Crowd source your green thumb with Folia

New changes going up!

2008-06-03T00:17:00.001-07:00

We're deploying some new stuff to the site right now, so you'll be seeing the sudoku around about now. We'll keep updating twitter as we go along...

Lifehackered and Uncluttered

2008-05-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

Following the success of being Uncluttered last Friday it appears that we've just been Lifehackered (I guess that's a word). So welcome everyone!

Temporary Turbulence! Hold Tight!

2008-05-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Hi guys - we are currently experiencing a little turbulence due to quite a load on the server at the moment....we are working on getting MyFolia back to its usual self right now. Thanks for your patience!

Update: we are just rebooting and bringing the server back up....almost there!

Update 2: We are back! Yay! We'll be watching the situation tonight as we go....

Getting an Oops page?

2008-05-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

Hey all - just a quick update to let you know that the site is temporarily down (no, it's not just you!) and we are working on getting it back on line. Shouldn't be too long - we'll keep you updated.

...and we are up once again. Sorry about that!

Review of MyFolia on Unclutterer.com!

2008-05-28T04:24:00.000-07:00

We got a great review of us on Unclutterer.com this week...a big welcome to all of our brand new members that found us from this site - we even (briefly) tipped into the del.icio.us popular list because of you guys! Woohoo!

New Feature: Is there a folia gardening group in your local area?

2008-05-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

We now have a handy dandy map to see if there are any local groups in your area. If there isn't any groups near you yet, why not be a trailblazer and create one?

New Features: Invite-O-Matic & New Navigation

2008-05-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

We've got some nice new features for you this week:

Invite-O-Matic: We've finally created an page that lets you send invites to friends and family. We've linked it all in with your own personal invite page - so if and when they join, you'll get a message letting you know they've arrived and a little "invited by" link to you will appear on their profile.

New Navigation: Again, a long overdue improvement to the site is brand new navigation that makes navigating through your gardens and plants a whole lot easier. We think it's super cool - Check it out!

Updating the site!

2008-05-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

We are just in the process of moving to nice new shiny servers - we'll be up again in the next couple of minutes. We'll keep you posted :)

Update: we are now waiting for the changes to propagate across the interweb - some people may be able to now see the site. If you can't see MyFolia yet, we should be visible very soon...

Update 2: We are fully moved and have just unpacked the boxes. Welcome to the new server!

MyFolia is Gardening Website of the Year!

2008-05-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! MyFolia just won Gardening Website of the Year in the Mouse & Trowel Awards !

We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to both nominate us and to place their vote…you guys are awesome!

p.s. A special thanks to Spidra who kept the publicity machine in motion and made sure everyone got their votes in on time, and also to Colleen Vanderlinden for running the awards so fantastically well :)

Helpful Features

2008-05-01T03:18:00.000-07:00

We've just added heaps of nice little help features throughout the site to help our new members get up and running faster - included in this change is a little re jig of your home pages to include a "How To Get Started" panel. Go have a look and tell us what you think!

MyFolia reviewed on Killer Startups!

2008-04-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-29T00:41:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

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

More Statistical Goodness for Plants!

2008-04-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-20T01:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-09T01:07:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

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!

Swaps! and a Lick of Paint For Groups

2008-03-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

We've just added some more functionality to the new Swap Page that shows you all gardeners in your area that have swaps available in a fabulous Google Map. We have also added a page that is a bit of a work in progress called Swap Spy - on this page you can take a look at some mad-scientist-style experiments we are working on with the Swap data.

Nath has done a bit of spring cleaning over on the groups page - you'll find them much nicer in layout now, and we've gardener-fied it all up with some profile info.

We've also added location to the gardener profile pages, so now we can get stuck into providing some interesting functionality at this level - stay tuned!

Changes goin' up

2008-03-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

We are just in the middle of deploying some changes - this one might take a couple of minutes, but we should be back up soon...

..and we're back!

Updating the Site...

2008-03-14T06:19:00.001-07:00

Shouldn't be too long.

01:22PM GMT: Looks like we are back up and running now. All good to go :)

Planting Events now Sprouting in your Activity Feed!

2008-03-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

Since we were working on the activity feed this week we thought we might as well include the first draft of Plant Events (you know, while we were at it)

Events are now linked in with your journal, so if you are journaling about a plant you will now find a new option called “Growing Event”. If you choose an event your journal will be marked (with a funky looking star) as a growing event in your friends activity streams.

Go check it out!

Updated Activity Feeds!

2008-03-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed your personal homepage looking a little different when you just logged on.

Firstly we’ve brought latest activity to your personal homepage so that you can kept better track of latest happenings on the site. We’ve also kept the existing Activity pages so you can see the history if you wish.

We’ve also merged Friends Journals into your activity stream so now you can keep better track of what your gardening buddies are up to. This also coincides with another feature we have which I’ll leave for a separate post – which you may have seen appear in your activity stream :)

Anyway, hope you like the change and as always let us know what you think.

Site down for updates

2008-03-11T05:20:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone!

Just a quick one to let you know that we’re going to take the site offline for a little while to roll out some new updates… which we’ll reveal after :)

I’m planning on doing this around 12:20pm GMT and it should take around 10mins – fingers crossed

Update @ 12:25pm - Almost there!

Update @ 12:27pm - Bouncing the server....

Update @ 12:28pm - And we are up again!