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

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

 

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.