Nominations for the Folia Faire now open!

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!

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!

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

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!

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!

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

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.