New Folia Gardening Widgets now Available!

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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!):

1. Go to the widgets page
2. Copy the code under the “To install this widget” heading (it should already be personalised to your gardener name)
3. 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

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!

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!)

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

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!

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...

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!