Harvest Tracking is Here (and Automatic Moving too!)

After working through all your suggestions and feedback about how you want to track your harvests on Folia, we’ve finally rolled out version 1 of Harvest Tracking! We’re really excited about this one (especially me, as I got my first harvest of the year a couple of days ago – how’s that for good timing!)

New Milestone Notes

When you next go to add a new journal item to your journal you should now notice there is a new text field with a comment bubble image. That’s a new field that you can use to write a bit of detail about each journal item – it’s completely optional, but really handy when you want to note a bit more about the event. It’s deliberately limited to 140 characters (just like twitter!) as it is intended to be for short notes that describe the event. So, for example: if you log a treating event for your sick little plant, you can pop a quick little note about what treatments you used. If you log a “Purchase” event you could log how much it was. It’s totally up to you how you use this feature, but hopefully it should give you much more flexibility in how you want to log information in your journal. This feature is for Folia Supporters only – check out our Become a Supporter! page for details.

Harvest Tracking

If you now select “Harvesting” as your event type for a journal item you’ll now magically get a couple of new fields appear – these fields will let you log the number of things you harvested, what amount type it was (items, baskets, cups etc.) and how much it weighed in total. These amounts are then tallied and displayed on your planting page in a new section called “Harvest Tally”. As you can see from my Strawberry example , you can mix and match the units as much as you like – it will tally up all items that are the same and display them together. The weight measurements are also totalled separately to the unit tally – so it should work equally well for precision gardeners that like getting their scales out, and for gardeners that like to work in rough numbers of bowls and bags (I think I might be in the second group there!). We’ve set your default units based on if you are in the US (lb) or elsewhere (kg) – apologies if you are a staunch metric-er and you live in the states! You can however change your default preference on your Account Configuration page to your unit of choice. This feature is for Folia Supporters only – check out our Become a Supporter! page for details.

Automatic moving of your Plantings from your Journal

Whilst we were at it, we also managed to build in a nice little automatic move feature to the journals. What you can do now if you select a “move” event (like transplanted, moved or planted out) is also select which garden it’s being moved to – and it will automatically move it there for you. As a bonus, it also logs where the planting has moved from and to for you! Check out my basil moving journal for an example of how the new move journal items look

Handy dandy links

• If you need some help with understanding how harvest tracking / planting moving works: 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

Filter your growing timeline by garden / Lots-O-Plants

It’s been a bit of a quiet week in terms of new stuff due to our little camping trip last week (yes, it did rain - the entire time!), but we’ve managed to sneak in a couple of minor improvements and bug fixes for you all. One of the improvements is a new filter on your growing timelines* that lets you filter by garden – this should hopefully make navigating around your timelines just a little bit easier :)

We’ve been also working away on a couple of features in the background too – we’ve been importing a whole heap of new plants into the system to make our plant database much more complete and accurate. At last count, we now have a staggering 79,454 plants now in the system – wow indeed! (..and that’s not even counting cultivars and varieties in which we have many thousands more.)

Due to this sudden surge in new plants, we’ve had to start doing a huge amount of work rejigging things like the plant search logic – we’re still working on rewriting this part of the site but we’re hoping that the search is working well enough for now (let us know if it’s not!) We’ll be tweaking and stablising the search over the next couple of weeks, but we’d love your help in testing it out – we’ll let you know when we start rolling out the changes.

*Growing timelines are a Supporter feature – Supporters help us pay for hosting costs to keep this site up-and-running. If you’d like to become a Supporter, check out the Become a Supporter! page.

Read more in the Announcements group: http://myfolia.com/groups/4-folia-announcements/topics/2298/posts

Reviews of Folia on Treehugger & Planet Green

We've had a bit of folia love this week with two lovely reviews on Treehugger and Planet Green - here's a bit of what they said about us:

Folia provides a user-friendly dashboard tool to help users know what plants are being sown and harvested, as well as weather forecasts, seed organizing, and photo organizing so that your garden can grow at its best...Folia's cool webtool helps you get all your seeds in a row - from listing chores to tracking frosts, researching sowing and harvesting timing to tracking observations about your garden.

Nice stuff, hey?

Sprouting, transplanting and harvest / bloom estimates for your timeline!

This one is a pretty exciting update for us – we’ve been waiting aaaages to implement this, but we’ve had to wait for enough data goodness to be entered into the system to make this work properly.

You’ll now find that your growing timelines have been shifted to the left slightly to show more of your future dates. This is because we are now displaying calculated estimated dates for sprouting, transplanting and harvest / bloom for each of your plantings. This data is being calculated from every one of the milestones that are being logged in the system for the variety that you grow – so it’s real info from real gardeners, not estimated dates from the back of random seed packets. This data will start becoming more accurate the more observations we have in the system – so remember to log all of your observations so that the data keeps getting better for everyone (and remember to classify all of your plantings too!) For an example, check out MattMiddleton’s fab timeline.

Over on the wiki page we’ve also added more detail to the planting estimates too – you’ll be able to see min / max and average days for germination, transplant and harvest days too. You’ll find these new estimates under the “How long does it take to grow?” heading on the plant and variety wiki pages. Check out Tomato for an example

The estimates are really wrong for my plant, how can I fix them?

Because we know this system isn’t going to be perfect all the time, we’ve also created a way for you to override the data in the system with your own. You’ll find three new fields on your planting edit page that will let you tweak the days between sprouting, transplanting and harvest for just your own plantings (this data doesn’t save back to the wiki, it's completely yours to use).

My timeline says my dahlia is ready for harvest – huh?

We’ve added some logic to check what sort of plant you have and we show either a bloom icon if it is a flower, or a harvest icon if it is fruit / vegetable. If you’re seeing a harvest icon for your flowers, edit the wiki page for that plant and set the Category field to Flower.

Timeline estimates are currently a Supporter feature only – Supporters help us pay for hosting costs for the site, and allow us to create more spanky features like this one!

Handy dandy links:

• If you need some help with the new estimate feature: 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

A-Z for your stash lists, Journal share link, new widget tab

Hey all – another week, another set of new features and goodies! So what’s new this week?

A-Z filters for your Stash Lists

Following on from last week’s A-Z on your plantings, for Supporters we’ve also now added A-Z filtering on your stash lists to make it easier to quickly find your stash items.

New look gardener profile page

We’ve also tidied up everyone’s home pages to make them a little clearer, and make functions like “add as a gardening buddy” a little easier to find. Check out Dee’s new look home page for an example!

Profile widget tab

Over in your profile settings page, you’ll find a new tab called Widgets – you’ll find a couple of widgets, blog badges and example email signature code – all personalised and ready to copy and paste.

Invite-o-matic

We’ve also made the Invite-a-friend link a permanent fixture on your top header bar (in the top right of the page) If you haven’t used it yet, give it a whirl and send an invite or two! If they join up from your invite emails, you’ll get a message in your folia mail and they’ll get a little “invited by” link in their profile with your username. Woo!

New Journals Share link

On every journal, you’ll now find a silver little Share button that will let you quickly bookmark or share the journal on lots of different networks and sites. So, if you do read an great journal on your travels around the site, remember that you can now email, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Digg it (to name a couple).

Some handy dandy links:

• If you need some help with the new A-Z stash lists or widget pages: 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

Photobucket is here!

Yep, after quite a bit of struggling with the API, we’ve finally added Photobucket to our photo hosting options, alongside Picasa / Blogger & Flickr. Woo!

What’s Photobucket?

Photobucket is a site much like flickr and picasa that stores your photos. It’s also free – to get a free account you can sign up here.

How do I connect up my Photobucket account?

Take a mosey on over to your (hugely improved) photo account page and select “Photobucket” from the dropdown list. Copy and paste your entire Photobucket URL into the textbox and you’re away! We’ve got a new Photobucket Help page that will give you some pointers if you get stuck (it’s got some handy screenshots too)

When are you going to let me upload my photos directly to the site?

We’re still not in a position where we can offer direct photo uploading to the site as we still have to be frugal with our bandwidth. We are also of the belief that these sites host photos much better and with more features than we will ever be able to provide – and it means that your photos are not locked to our site, you can use them where ever you like. Flickr and Photobucket have great little photo upload programs that can be downloaded to your desktop, so if you aren’t a big user of photo sites you can just upload from your desktop and start journaling on folia.

• XP Photobucket Uploader

• FTP uploading

• Firefox Add-on for Photobucket

• Photobucket uploading tutorials

Hmmm, it doesn’t seem to be working for me…

It’s definitely very very beta – we are definitely anticipating that there might be some teething problems with this option to begin with, just as we had with flickr and picasa. If you are having trouble connecting your Photobucket account, firstly take a look at the Photobucket Help page to see if we’ve covered your problem already, then ask us in one of the groups below:

• If you need some help connecting up your account: Help!

• If you think you’ve found a bug: Bugs & Issues

• If you have any ideas to make this better: Suggestions & Feedback

Your new Growing Timeline page & some more new icons!

We were going to release this on the weekend, but we had to do some server tweaking this morning and thought we might as well pop these changes up for you all to start playing with! Aren’t you all spoilt this week, hey?

On your Dashboard you’ll find that your growing timeline heading has now mysteriously turned itself into a link. If you click the link, you’ll now get taken to your brand spankin’ new timeline page! This page shows lots more weeks “at a glance” and increases the number of plantings you can see to 30. Best of all, your timeline is now fully public – so you can link to your timeline like this ( http://myfolia.com/gardener/nic/timeline ). Likewise, you can now see have a sticky beak at other gardener’s timelines and see what they’ve been up to lately. This is a feature for our lovely Supporters – they help us to keep the site up and running. If you aren’t a Supporter yet, take a look at your Become a Supporter! page for details.

Added to that, we’ve also added three new timeline icons: Potting Up / Repotted, Treating and Fertilising. These icons are available to all – so use as much as you please! More icons are coming as fast as I can make them up!