We've just rolled out some changes to the site that we're excited about.  We've done lots of jiggling of bits and as a result have some nice new search capabilities for gardens and plants.

More little changes appear throughout the site with the biggest being on your personal dashboard (if you haven't written or uploaded anything yet), and on the home page.

As always, your feedback is more than welcome - we value your opinion, so be sure to let us know what works and what doesn't

Just a quick note to let you know that you can now log into Greenthumbr via multiple browsers and be remembered across all - a slight oversight in the initial release.

Excellent :)

Awesome I approve and am very glad for this.

I'm pleased to note the rollout of our latest, much-requested feature.  Remember Me.  It's a simple thing, but has been oh so sorely missed.

Next time you login to your Greenthumbr account be sure the "Remember me on this computer" checkbox is selected.

The next time you return to the site using that computer, you're still logged in.  It makes life a little easier.  And you can always logout if you change your mind.

As always, user feedback is welcome.  We're still growing and working hard to make the site better for all of you!

Here's how to use Greenthumbr's rich journaling to connect with others.  This is part one of many, dealing with the basics of journaling.

Getting There

First, you need to get to the journal-writing screen.  You can bookmark this url, or follow this path:

First, get to your Dashboard.  If you're logged in, you can always do that from the links up in the blue sky on every page, near the top right.

Once you're at your Dashboard, you'll see your user menu on the right-hand side.  It includes a section to play with your journal.

Pick Write and you'll be at the screen where you can write in your journal.

The Basics

Like an email, writing in your journal needs a title and some content.  The portion for writing is smack in the middle of your screen.

In addition to the content, you can tag your entry. 

Tags are just little words or phrases that are meaningful to you.  You can add any tag that you like.  Just separate multiple tags with commas.  You can later browse your journal entries and images by the tags you have given them.

Working With Images

A picture is worth a thousand words, so inserting some images can save some typing.

Every journal entry can have one-or-more images associated with it.  Let's start by simply inserting an image from your gallery into the entry.

When you first start, your content will include no images, and your journal entrie's gallery will be empty.

By clicking on the All Images tab of this box, you will be able to browse all images you've already uploaded to Greenthumbr.

Clicking on a picture, or selecting Insert into entry will cause the image to be nicely inserted into your journal entry.

Alternatively, clicking Add to gallery will add the image to the gallery associated with this journal entry, without inserting it into the content.

If you want to upload new images, simply select the Upload tab of the image box.  If Flash is behaving, you will be allowed to upload many files. 

All of the uploaded images will be added to your post's gallery, but not immediately inserted into the content of the journal entry.

At any time, you can easily delete an image from the content or the associated gallery.

All images in the post's gallery will be made available to your readers, even if they don't appear in the actual content of the journal entry.

Save & View!

When you're happy with the content of your journal entry, just click Save and it'll be published to the site.

What's next?

Read Part 2 about using Topics while journaling.

Yes, I enjoy the "it's all about ME" factor of the dashboard. Thanks, Shovelpunks -- you all rock!

Love this. It is very helpful especially if you are not one to be on all the time. I love to see the replies that others have left on a post I responded to. Awesome. Keep up the great work yall.

Want to keep up with discussions that are relevant to you?

Check out your new dashboard.  That is a link to the previous week's worth of relevant information for you.  You can also view it in terms of...

• Your last login
• The last 6 hours
• The last 24 hours
• The last week
• The last month

What do we mean by relevant?  Certainly, someone commenting upon your journal entries or images counts.  But as surprising as it may be, the world does not revolve solely around you. 

If you've commented upon someone else's journal entries, you've expressed an interest in it.  When yet another person (the party of the 3rd part, let's say) leaves a comment, you'll be notified. 

This is all just trying to keep conversations going by keeping everyone up-to-date.

Feedback, as always, is muchly appreciately.

Awesome! I added one to my gardening blog.
http://www.newsprout.blogspot.com

If you're logged in, you can now grab a badge to tell others about your Greenthumbr lifestyle.

Simply select the badge you want, and we'll provide the code you can paste into your blog, home page, or profiles on other social networks. The badge will link right back to your profile here on Greenthumbr.

Thanks already to everyone who's mentioned us in their non-Greenthumbr blog.  Now you can add us to your sidebar, too

Update: If you place a badge on another site, leave a comment here with the URL!

LANCE
YOUR SEEDLINGS LOOK GREAT. I'M HAVING TROUBLE WITH MY TOMATO SEEDINGS GROWING TALL AND THIN, ANY SUGGESTIONS?
CORAZONE5/6?

Looking great over there with those seedlings. They are huge!

I'm glad to here this new update. Now I'm off to go play with it.

Wow! Your seedlings are looking spectacular! Actually they're really not seedlings anymore. :)

Over the past 2 weeks I've slowly been moving some of my seed starts out to the garden.  My Oak Leaf Lettuce and Viroflay Spinach are looking good, along with my Heirloom Arugula.  Last weekend, the radishes, pak choy, and some more spinach came out.

All of this shuffling about of my plants presented a problem for me.  One that I knew was coming and that some of our beta testers had already mentioned.  When I started these plantings, they were but seeds in a corner of my basement.  Now they are out in the garden.  I wanted to have that reflected in my Greenthumbr garden.

So - big new feature announcement.  You can move your plantings around your garden now.  And you can specify when they were planted, since you're not always going to run directly to your computer the moment you get something in the ground.

We're excited about all the changes that are happening here on the site.  And there are more on the way.  Stay tuned!

Woo Hoo! I can't wait to see all the new comers and what their wonderful plants and gardens.

Hi Lance!
I love love love this site and I visit often because we are trying to make our property presentable.
I also like your long hair!
--Alexis

Welcome to Greenthumbr's first blossom.  It's spring and we're open!

We've opened to the public tonight - a night bloom, it seems.  Thanks very much to our beta testers.  Vanillalotus, Sarah O, Carol, Muffy, rasrootz, Katie - all of you - have been extremely helpful these last 2 months.  Your feedback and support as we worked to get the site ready for today was very much appreciated.

As always, we welcome everyone's feedback.  We're looking forward to the gardening year with you all!

Keep Planting,

The Shovelpunks

 

Over the weekend, we had a mere 15 minutes of downtime (mid-afternoon, though, of course).

This downtime allowed us to move from one server to another, about 30 feet further down the hall.

Greenthumbr now has its own dedicated server, thanks to the fine folks at Contegix.

Also, here's Lance, the first full-timer working on Greenthumbr now, when he's not working on his fence.  We've now got a guy working 24/7 (he doesn't sleep) to make Greenthumbr even awesomer.

Great changes going on. I like them they definitely do make the site look cleaner. The member spotlight is much better and the search helps a lot more too.

The weather this week has been beautiful.  Mostly sunny with the occasional cloud or even a shower.  Warm during the day, cool in the evening.  We've all been busy getting our seeds hardened, watching things bloom.  It really has been a nice week.  All the dogwoods here in Asheville are in full bloom.

 

With all of the beautiful weather and so much to do with seedlings and starts in the garden, you'd think nothing else would get done.  Work would suffer.  Although it has been hard to keep ourselves indoors at times, we Shovelpunks have been diligently improving things behind the scenes.

Today we've rolled out a few nice changes that we'd like to mention.  Overall, we're working hard to make the site easier to use and more intuitive.  In today's update you'll see small changes like this in the individual garden pages.  For example, Vanillalotus's Balcony Garden.

The biggest changes with today's update are on the member spotlight page.  The overall design and layout received a well-deserved face lift. 

We're also quite proud of our new member search feature.  Now you can search for other Greenthumbr members by name, location, zone or even plant!  For example, with search terms "7b spinach" will get you all the gardeners on Greenthumbr who are growing spinach in zone 7b.  It's a beautiful thing.  Please give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

 

I'm having some trouble setting my garden picture from my existing images, and even from images on my computer. I get an error message telling me that the page I requested doesn't exist. Sometimes, after 3 or 4 tries, an image shows up, but I'm not sure what (if anything) I did differently.
It's no big deal, but I thought you'd want to know.

A few changes have been rolled out today.  One seemingly small, but very nice feature is temporal navigation.  Now you can move forward and backward in time via links to the next and previous items.  This makes getting around the site surprisingly easier.  It works the same for both journal entries and images. 

We've also added some niceties to gardens.  Gardens now get icons just like users do.  These garden icons show up around the site and give a nice bit of color to the garden pages.  So head over to your gardens page and add a picture so we can see what it looks like.

We're getting there - bit by bit - and can't wait to open this thing up to the world.  Just a few more tweaks and we're good to go.  :)  For all you beta testers, thanks so much for your feedback!  It has been invaluable.  Keep it coming.

Hey, just to clarify... At this point, email will *not* be sent. I just wanted everyone to have a chance to adjust their settings before we throw open the floodgates.

Probably Tuesday, after plenty of folks have had a chance to take a look at their settings, we'll enable it across the site.

Great Bob I'm excited to see these changes implemented.

We've roughed in some email notifications, but have not turned them on yet.  In preparation for them, you can do two things to ensure you'll be able to benefit.

First, make sure at least one email address is verified and set as your default address.

You can do that from the email settings page.

Secondly, you can adjust your settings for how often you want to be told about your friends' activities.

That can be configured from the notifications settings page.

We'll also be adding other knobs and switches, to control when and how you're informed of people leaving you comments, private messages or adding you as a friend.

Should we concerned about the unionized squirrels? Or is NC a right-to-work state?

We're slowly trying to build some traction, so we decided to give everyone some hint of what we're doing.  For people awaiting invitations, we now provide a public view of some of our blog entries.

Now at least there's a little reading material for folks.

And if you're intrigued, you can always easily sign up for an invitation, and we'll try to get you set up quickly enough.

On the inspiration note. I was really inspired by Kathy Sierra's talk. I plan on taking into consideration many of her concepts (http://headrush.typepad.com/) in order to make Greenthumbr an even better place for gardeners. :)

Thanks for doing this. This data will be super helpful.

I'm so glad we put those squirrels to work. I was tired of them spending the whole day eating all of my bird food.

It seems we recently had a regression in our code which resulted in some problems creating new plantings.  The plant search on the "add a new planting" page just didn't work anymore!

So, that's been fixed, the squirrels have shuttled the new code up to the server, and we're good to go.  Enjoy!

Of course, that should be calculated against the mean, not the median. We'll do a re-calc and reload this evening, probably.

We've continued to run data through the blender, and now have come up with information related to the last frost of the spring and the first frost of the autumn. 

And from there, we can tell you how long your frost-free growing season is.

Since these dates are not exactly consistent, you'll notice there's some scientific slop in the estimates provided on your profile pages.

For the mathletes who are reading, we calculated the median dates (in terms of day-of-year) for the last 15 years, calculated the standard-deviation, and provided a range 2 deviations on either side of the median.

For the non-mathletes, that means roughly 95% of the time, the actual frost dates will fall within that range.  But there's still a chance that they may occur before/after the ranges provided.

That's mother nature for you.

That'd be the fantastic June who came up with the notion. She's awesome, eh?

SXSW has been an absolute blast.  Inspiring, informative, great food, and awesome parties.  June and I went to Frank Warren's (http://postsecret.com) keynote today.  It was a really fascinating talk. 

Afterwards, we handed out seed packets to folks as they streamed out of the ballroom.  What a great reception we got.  Thanks SXSW for the smiles and good cheer as we tried to give each of you a dozen little sunflower seeds (well as many of you as we could)!

Now go grow some something!

I loved this idea. Whoever came up with the idea was an absolute genius. Probably the best marketing idea of all of SXSW.

From your private profile, you can now click on links to explore your current friends, or to find people near to you (within 50 miles).

In the near future, we'll have a way for you to import your contacts from other sources, and invite people directly to the service. 

Since we're in private beta mode, though, you can only befriend current users of the system.

If you joined using a seed packet, though, feel free to share your access code with others.  They can be reused and recycled.

Within the next few hours, Lance should be rendezvousing with June somewhere in Austin.  June's got a carload of our seed packets.

In addition to opening up invitations to anyone with a packet, we've recently made some major changes to the gardening aspects of GT.  Each garden should have a better profile page, along with better garden-management features.

In general, though, we do still have a ways to go before we'd consider gardens to be "done" of course.

Additionally, you'll find the members, plants and gardens spotlight pages (via the menu across the top of every screen) have been worked on to bring more activity to the surface.

 

For an update.... the seed packets have safely made it to Austin. :)

Over the weekend, the Shovelpunks, spouses and children gathered to perform the ballet of seed packet assembly. This involved some tricky maneuvering with double-sided tape, an errant ink-stamper, a sunny day, and the sometimes uncooperative wind.

None-the-less, seed packets are out.  Existing beta-users should contact their introducer, and make sure we have a postal address for you. 

Others, particularly people at SXSW, will have an opportunity to pick up some packets in person from our roving Shovelpunk team of Lance and June.

Each packet contains an access-code which will enable the holder of the packet entry into Greenthumbr as an early tester. Along with one of two varieties of Helianthus (sunflower).

So, let's all welcome the new influx of people with open arms and a helping hand.

Hundreds of the awesome seed packets, designed by the inspired June, are packed and ready to go out to greenthumbs everywhere.

We've run the past 15 years of surface temperature data through the blender, applied the USDA methodology, and have produced a modern USDA hardiness zone mapping.

What does "modern" mean?  Well, the original USDA map uses data from the 1980s.  The Arbor Day Foundation recently re-ran the calculation with data from the 1990s, to create their modern map.  Their results in a slow march of zones northward. 

For you, that means you zone is slowly increasing.

For me, I'd considered Asheville to be 7a.  Now we're more like 7b.

None-the-less, we've used the same methodology as the USDA, but applied it to more recent (and thus, hopefully more pertinent) climate data.  The data we've crunched includes dates from January 1st, 1993 up to last week.  Really modern.

And the result is now you and your gardens will have a Hardiness Zone associated with it.

Go now and check your profile or your gardens.  If you've told us your location, in the sidebar we'll tell you your zone.

Today is a big day.

We (Shovelpunks) are officially recognized as a corporate entity as of today.  And we're a taxpaying member of society, no less.  With a bank account.

Which all adds up to mean that most of the generic "Advertisement" blocks on the site are being replaced with bonafide advertisements.

Since we're still locked down, Google has no idea what sort of content we hold, beyond what is exposed through the URLs.  So don't expect anything overly relevant until we open the doors wider.

Just as you can associate plants, plantings, and sections of your gardens with journal entries, you can now associate all of those with images, too.

Click on the image above, and you'll be taken to the image information page, where you'll see it's linked to my actual chocolate mint planting in my garden.  Therefore, it's also linked to the general plant of mint, and my kitchen herb garden.

Praise be unto rich relationships!

Is that link overhang in my previous message gonna cause problems once you start adding ads?

Hello Bob,

Not sure if this is the group to community rename you are looking for, but mentioned one that may be related in -
http://greenthumbr.com/members/20/journal/2008/2/13/something_wrong_with_shovelpunks

Thanks
Rick

Feeds for groups are now available.  You can subscribe to receive all new discussions or all new discussions + comments (i.e. the firehose).

Start your feed readers!

I've just deployed some changes that should prevent other users with messing around with your private data.  For example, you should only be able to upload or change images for your own personal profile.  Not anyone else's.

Please keep an eye on this and report anything you may stumble across where it seems you might be able to view another member's private information, or change something that you shouldn't (such as someone else's image titles).

Comments in this post are fine for reporting that kind of thing.

Thanks!

If you've been subscribing to the RSS feeds, you may have noticed that they were lacking reference information.  If you wrote a journal entry about rosemary and other herbs in the backyard section of your garden, referenced it to the Herbs topic, and included an image or two, those cross references didn't show up in the feed.  It simply included the content of your post.

That has now changed.  Journal entries in feeds now contain all metadata references with links to the referred thing, whether it's a garden, plant, topic, group, etc.

Enjoy!

So, we need some educational pages so the 45-year-old gardeners we attract can learn all about RSS. Is Google Reader the "best" web-based reader to integrate smoothly with and use for teaching people?

This sounds all semantic-webby, doesn't it? Wewt!

So, RSS is a big component of this site.  You can get feeds on topics, or a single journal entry, or a member's journal.  Typically, if you want to follow a journal your feed will include all new journal entries, but none of the comments.  If you wanted comments, you'd have to subscribe to those journal entries you were interested in individually.

Well, now you can drink from the firehose, as they say on slashdot.  For both topics and members, you can now subscribe to the full feed which includes all new journal entries AND comments for those entries, interleaved and ordered by timestamp.

Go on.  Subscribe.  You know you want it.

Still in-progress, but I've played with the Image and Journaling bits some.

The "description" has been somewhat de-emphasized.  I think, maybe, perhaps, possibly, the intention is that the description is merely a short, fact-filled, well, description, of the image.

"The tomatoes killed by bees"... "the garlic the dogs dug up"...  Barely more than the title, really, I guess.

But, I've added (twice, in fact) a "Write about this image" link, which punts you to the journalling screen with the image linked up as a reference.  It's not currently inserted into the journal entry, which I reckon is considered a bug.  We'll get that fixed straight-away... tomorrow.

Also, using this method, you can write about a set of images (just link them all in), and the entry will apear next to each image.  You don't have to copy/paste your description around, nor are you limited to just associating it with one of several images in the set.  Just link it up rightly to one or more images, and off you go.

If you reference a planting, or an area of your garden in a journal entry, it'll appear on your garden's blog.  You don't have to reference the entire garden to get it to work.  It's smart enough to find journal entries about things in your garden now.

I feel like we've hit a major milestone.  Now you can write journal entries related to sections/areas of your garden, or specific plantings. 

On the journal editing screen, in the left side-bar, there's a 'Your gardens & plantings' option.  That's a unified picker for a hierarchy of your garden arrangement, plus a way to see all plantings (recursively) in that section.

Will of course need some scrolling UI love, but at least it's there, and all journaling goes through the same screen now, no matter the context.

I've done another once-over on the Member's Spotlight page, and I think it's starting to come together to be a useful hub.

I've added some stuff to your Network->Friends page, but I'm feeling uninspired.  Likewise with Network->Communities.

I have completed, I hope, the "group" to "community" rename most anywhere I could find.  Let me know if you trip across any mention of "groups" anywhere.

As you craft journal entries and insert images, you'll now notice that we're inserting clickable images, which link right on back to the image's page.

Additionally, we've gone through all historical journal entries and run them through the Fixeration Device, so they should all link appropriately also.

And lastly, stylistically, images are now centered.

Just doing my part to participate in Lance's Week of Photography.

Bob is a prolific writer.  But in addition to creating lots of new content on the site, he's also constantly going back and revising things.  I found myself doing this too.  I'd write a journal entry, then realize I should add tags or a reference to a plant or a topic.  

That's all good except for the fact that every time you change something a new activity is created.  You've probably seen this on the Member Spotlight page where the first 10 activities are all modifications of a single journal entry.  Or when you upload an image and then change a title.  It shouldn't be two activities.

That's now changed.  These things are all really just a single activity - lots of little tweaks with saves in between.  Now, activities have a rolling 10 minute window so that multiple actions on a single thing (journal entry, image, etc) appear as a single activity.

This should make the Member Spotlight page (and any other page that lists activities) look cleaner and less full of garbage - a good thing.  :)

Good morning everyone.  Just a quick note to let you know that you can now subscribe to an RSS feed of a member's images.  The feed includes the medium sized version of the image, the title and photographer's name, and any EXIF data we may have for the image.

At the moment, the feed limits the total number of images shown to 10, but that's easily changeable if we'd like to do that.

It's been a photography kind of week for me.  Any you?  Now go take some pictures!

A dogwood tree in spring.

A few new topics in the past day:  Books, Photography, and Flowers.

Also, the owner of a journal-entry can now destroy the journal entry.  So Lance, you can clean up your wayward post in June's garden (about lettuce).

Per June's designs, what were formerly known as "Groups" are now "Communities".  URLs have changed, UI has changed. Code has not.

Additionally, the former "Greenthumbr Staff" has been renamed to reflect our more formal group name, of Shovelpunks.  Just seems to flow better.

Okay, I've supposedly added tag support to journaling now.

You'll see a tag cloud in your profile, derived from the tags on your journal entries.  Right now, tags on entries always link back to the author's tag cloud, I think.  I think we need to sometimes, in some contexts, link back to the (currently non-existant) global tag cloud.

Or maybe just provide a mine->everyone's transition, like del.icio.us does.

I've started the Grand Unification of journal writing.

From Plants, Topics or Groups, you can [start a new discussion], which will throw you into your centralized journal-entry screen, with a reference pre-populated for you.

You can remove it.  You can add others.  It's your normal editing page.

Currently, when you're done, it plonks you into your journal.  Shortly, if you've left the original reference, we'll drop you back at the Plant, Topic, or Group you were reading before you wandered off to write.

Just asking is all.  Not sure yet what I think the answer is.

Just created a new topic due to popular demand:  Herb Gardening.

I will smack the next person who asks for Peaches to go with it.

Allrighty!

At least through your personal journal UI, you can now [edit] existing journal entries.  Edit link might be broken elsewhere on the site, but at least there is now one way in for editing.

You can edit the references, along with the text and title.  Tags still to-come.

Update: Editing is now allowed!

Right now, while you can write journal entries from a variety of places, all except the one available through [my]->[journal]->[create] are considered deprecated at the moment.

The creation screen under your journal in your profile is rich, and allows wildly editing of things.

You can search for plant species, and pop-up extra information (which we will expand, and allow browsing of pics for insertion, etc).  At the moment, you can insert a link to the plant page, along with the plant name, from the pop-up.

Still more UI work needed, but that's the direction I'm heading.

You can also pick topics and groups, while images don't yet work.  Nor do tags, so ignore that box.

So, I'm moving forward with my insistance that a Garden is the same thing as a property.  A street address is a single garden.  I don't care if you insist that you have an inside garden, a flower garden and a vegetable garden.

They're all just sections of a garden, your garden, in which you live.

For instance:

http://greenthumbr.com/gardens/irony/garden

Also, when you create a new garden, you are given the option to optionally select an optional layout from a set of templates (apartment, suburban, intense, or just plain none).

Hopefully this structure will help guide folks into thinking about their garden as being their entire environ. 

Anyhow, try creating a garden and some plantings.  They generate activities and journal entries now.

So, now you can recover your password.  Provide your email address and we'll send a link that will let you change your password to something new.  The link will be valid for 48 hours (this was an arbitrary decision on my part, but we'll probably want some expiration).  After that, you'll have to try again.  Once you do change your password, the link is immediately invalidated.

As admins we'll have the ability to monitor the number and frequency that this happens overall and for an individual user.  The views for that aren't done yet though.

Finally, we've reached some actual botanical involvement to our little social network.

http://greenthumbr.com/gardens/garden-of-irony/garden/7

(Remind me to enable hotlinks in the WYSIWYG editor soon...)

Go to one of your gardens, make sure it has a section (yes, screwy UI currently), and then drill into that section via [Explore].

Sooner or later an [Add a planting] link appears in the left sidebar.

Add a planting.  Enjoy the fancy, hopefully-not-broken, AJAX species search.

The whole user-interaction of the gardens module still needs plenty of mucking about.  It's confusing.  It's conflicting.  It's just plain bad.  Do not file any UI bugs against it yet, please.

Just marvel at the AJAX.

I've moved the private messages off the your [Dashboard] for now.  They are now under [Network]->[Messages].

Your dashboard, on the other hand, now is a handy list of comments made to your journal entries and/or images.

Ultimately, anything "relevant" shall appear there.

The latest deployment (as of Jan 28, 1:00 AM) includes RSS feeds for individual discussions within any context - Member, Garden, Group, Topic or Plant

We still need the "roll-up" feeds which track all discussions and comments together within a single context, e.g. everything posted for a given plant.  And it looks like groups still needs a top-level feed.  Soon, soon.

 

I've started enabling site-wide search for the variety of assets we have floating around now.

The search box in the header is the whole-site search, which, if I recall, currently searches over

• Users
• Plants
  
• Journal Entries

For instance, try searching for "dog".  You'll find some posts by Lance and Katie, along with some plants that involve "dog" in their name.