Recap Flashback! Picasa / Blogger Photos...Going Live...Stash and Groups

In addition to our normal announcements in the Folia Announcements Group, we are going to start posting regularly about all the changes, new functionality and other things we deem newsworthy here. (It's a bit of a MyFolia new years resolution, really - we knew were getting a little behind on the blog updating, and we thought it was time to start being a little less top secret.)

So, we thought a good place to start would be by doing a bit of a flashback / recap on some of the more exciting things we've rolled out already:

Now Supporting...Picasa and Blogger Photos

You can now use all your picasa photos on MyFolia - and better yet, since blogger has recently linked with picasa, all your photos uploaded to your blogger accounts are now accessible too. To link your account up, just visit your MyFolia Settings Page, pop in your google account details in and you're off and racing!

Knocking Down the Garden Walls - Part I

We have decided that a staggered approach to going live is the best option for MyFolia - and as part 1 of this step to publicness we have opened up a couple of your pages on the site for everyone to take a peek at. So, you are now able to send your gardener and garden profile pages to your great auntie betty to look at if you like (and if she would like to join up and share her gardens, make sure you show her how!). We will be slowly opening up more pages as we go until we are completely live. Hurrah!

Stash Stash Stash

Got a shoebox full of seed packages? Now you can organise them within MyFolia so you know what you don't have to buy this year - you can also mark your stash as available for trade so that other Folians can contact you about a trade.

Groupy Goodness

Groups are here! You can join or create any group you please. We have a couple of groups with some interesting topics at the moment - Annet's Creative Solutions Group is currently discussing some creative uses for plastic bottles; whilst over in Murray's Worm Farming Group we have some thoughts on using bathtubs as worm farms!

We weren't telling a lie when we said we would listen to your suggestions - most of the new features above were requested by our dedicated beta testers. If you have a good idea (or even a crazy way-out-there idea) for the site then let us know in the suggestions and feedback forum - we love hearing them!

We are both now in the middle of cooking up our next bunch of features, which we should be rolling out really soon...so stay tuned, it's going to be a big year for MyFolia!

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 :)

We have a beta queue!

We have some people now waiting very patiently on our invite list (oooh look at us! we have a waiting list now!) so we thought we should give you a bit of a rundown of this weeks plan:

This week we are aiming to go live with a version of the site that includes some interesting goodies that we wanted the next round of testers to come in with fresh eyes for. So we are holding back the invites until we get the new version up and stable - this should (hopefully) be around Thursday-ish.

We send out an invite email when we turn the beta accounts on, so you should know when you can login and begin testing...if you don't get an invite by the end of the week, drop us a note and we'll sort it out for you :)

Improvements - and our 150th member!

We've just gone and put up a mini release with stacks of little bits and pieces throughout the site, so beta testers - take a look around!

We have also just reached 150 members - not bad for two weeks we think! With the 150th member, we have now reached the limit for the original "seedling" link, so we will be granting people beta access from our waiting list every couple of days or so, depending on how many people we think we can handle.

Thanks once again to all our fantastic beta testers and the wonderful ideas they have come up with so far :)