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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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!