Happy new (gardening) year!

So, it's now 2008 and don't we have a very big year ahead of us at Folia!

Fresh back from our little holiday break, we are now back in development mode and busy cooking up some fantastic new features that will be arriving quite soon.

To all our new members that joined us over the break – we’d like to take the opportunity to say hi and welcome – we really hope you are liking the site. To all our not-so-new members - again, thanks for sticking with us and giving us some great suggestions and feedback.

We are now up to over 500 members, which isn't too bad for a site only a couple of months old - it will be exciting to see where we end up at the end of this year!

3 Months Old!

Folia is now a whole 3 months of age! And hasn't it been a busy 12 weeks for us since we pressed the big red "make site go" button - in that short amount of time we've already managed to develop a whole heap of great functionality:

- Journalling for your plants, your gardens and your gardening adventures
- A Seed Stash area to keep track of "not planted yet"s
- Groups for you to talk about everything and anything gardening related
- Geographic locations of gardens, to see who else is just around your corner
...and heaps and heaps of little tiny improvements far to numerous to mention.

We have still got lots of ideas left to go (we have to keep rewriting our list on the wall just to fit them all on) so this is still just the start...a big thank you to all of our wonderful (and patient) beta testers who have provided us with fantastic feedback and positive comments - it's really motivated us to keep going and keep trying to make things better :)

Moving to our new home

We are currently in the process of moving servers. We started this process on Friday 11:45am GMT.

We've spent the last hours packing up all your gardens and have set them up ready for you when the site comes back online.

Depending on your internet provider this should take no longer than 2 hours or anything up to 96 hours (hopefully not though). Please keep checking back every so often and the next time you see the site it will be from our speedier, shinier new home!

UPDATE: The domain name resolved within 30 mins. Now we're just waiting for all of the Internet Providers to catch up and take on the new name (and stop redirecting to the old servers)

Moving ahead with a new server

Well, after the last fiasco with MediaTemple's hissy fits, we took the plunge to trial a new hosting provider - SliceHost. Where MediaTemple protects you from the inner working of the services and servers you buy, SliceHost just drops you in there and lets you tinker directly withe the server itself. I can choose the operating system, reboot it, and install whatever I want on there.

Anyway not getting into the nitty gritty, it took just over 2 days to set up and using an old domain name we set up the myfolia site on the new SliceHost server just to test it out. One thing really stood out - it's fast. Blindingly fast! Pages load so quick you don't even realise that you're clicking on them. We're a little disappointed we didn't do this sooner :)

So - we're going to do a bit more testing and will be looking into moving over the site to the new server. But we'll keep you posted on that.

And we're back up and runing

Looks like MediaTemple has sorted the issue out on their side and have our site back up and running again. We're really sorry about it being slow for so long and even down for an hour or so last night whilst MediaTemple applied some fixes to the server.

Hopefully that will be the last of the issues as we're planning on moving to a new host very soon. We'll keep you all posted until that happens as we may have to take the site offline so that we can transfer all of the details over.

For those of you on  the waiting list give us a couple of days so that we can sort this out and we will be inviting you all in very soon!

Slow Site Performance

We're really sorry about the site being slow at the moment. Our hosting provider (MediaTemple) is having issues with "web latency" at the moment. Unfortunately, this has been going on since about 11pm GMT Sunday night (during a site upgrade - lucky us) and doesn't seem to have been fixed since.

The bad news is that they don't really know what's causing it or how long it's going to take. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and that we'll be back up to speed. The better news is that we're looking for another provider unless MediaTemple can move us from Grid.Cluster.1 to a more reliable server. Either way, trust that we're looking into a faster, more reliable and better hosting environment to host the site.

We'll keep you posted on what's going on.

Your Home Page Goodness

Ok, we are back up and running with some nice new shiny features.

Most noticeable is your new folia homepage, filled with lots of tools and summary info about your gardens and what's been happening around folia - you can now see all your gardening buddies, faves, gardens and latest plantings all on the one page.

We have also done a fair amount of tweaking to the "add planting" page and added some more intelligence to our plant matching logic to make finding your plant name and variety a snap!

So, have a wander around and let us know what you think of the changes!