Mid Week Update: Stash Linkage and Plant-O-Matic 1.0

A couple of little changes around folia land that we thought you might like to hear about:

Link Your Stash
Up until now, your Stash and your Plantings were two completely separate things - now, you can add plantings from your Stash and keep track of all plantings that you've ever grown from a single seed packet. We think this is going to be a great way of telling which seeds worked, and which ones didn't. (or provide you with a convenient excuse as to why your basil died again - "it was a bad batch of seeds, obviously! Nothing to do with me forgetting to water for a month!")

...and introducing : Plant-O-Matic v1.0
We've just added a nice little feature to the Add Planting page to automatically search for likely plant matches for you. Our hardworking Plant-O-Matic v1.0 will scour our plant database looking for what you meant by "Basil - The Green One" and try and help you out. Of course, being v1.0 means that he might not get it right all the time, but we will keep tweaking his logic until we get it right. He might not be able to help you out on your "Some Sort of Green Leafy Plant" however - but he'll give it a go :)

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!