Multi-planting journaling is here!

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!

HOWTO: Twitter your Gardening Journal Automatically

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)

Improved Journal Features - auto happiness updating & more events!

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 :

1. 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!)
2. 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)