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.

Dana - you might try to give the roots a little more room by repotting it in a larger container. Water it a couple of times per week, keep it out of direct sunlight, and fertilize it every month or so. Take some pictures and let us see your progress! :)

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!

I received one of these plants as a gift last week - it has beautiful white and red "flowers." I read Sarah O's comment that they are easy to care for but the last time I had one I actully killed it and I'm not bad w/ plants so I'm not sure what went wrong. I would love advice on how to care for it and keep it blooming. It came from a florist so it's in a pretty small pot - should I re-pot it? How often should I water it? Thanks so much for any advice!!!

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.

yeah, we went out on a limb and didn't even cover any of our plants. but we will probably be covering them tomorrow night.

So far we've stayed above 34 degrees here in Asheville with the latest cold front that's come through.  I've been tracking the last 48 hours of temp data here.  Set your location and we'll find the weather station nearest you, of course.

Anyway - still well above freezing.  Forecasts are calling for a tax day low of 32.  Hopefully it won't dip much below that.  Here's hoping this is our last flirtation with that freezing point. 

Today, in spite of the hail or sleet or snow or rain or whatever that was that was coming down, I left my lettuce seedlings outside under the shelter of the front porch.  Here's hoping they're tough!

 

The last frost date for my place is April 26 based on the historical weather data for around here - and it's Mother's Day based on local lore.  Whatever it is, these guys are going in the ground next weekend.  Lettuces like cold weather, right?

 

An update on this. It seems that Bob was correct. Essentially, spathiphyllum won't voluntarily propagate in the US, so it's not in the database.

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.

The peace lily was one of the first plants I managed to keep alive for more than a decade. I found it so helpful that it would start to wilt slightly when it needed water, and then perk right up and look great after it's "drink." I love to give these as gifts, because they ARE so easy to maintain.

But I have no information about why you can't find them :)

Even before I had much interest in growing things on my own, I knew what a peace lily was.  I think I might have had one in college - gracing the pit that was my apartment.  I don't think it bloomed much though.

A couple of weeks ago I bought one of these, also known as Spathiphyllum, from Home Depot.  It was in a section of plants that seemed to have arrived from Florida, and was $9.99.  After pulling 6 or 7 out of the dozen or so that were crammed together, this one seemed to be the best.  I couldn't pass it up.

It has taken me 2 weeks, but I finally got it into it's own pot with some good organic potting soil, some Espoma, and Sphagnum moss all mixed together.  It was an experiment.  We'll see how it goes.  :)

I find it odd though, that there's no entry for "peace lily" or "Spathiphyllum" in the plants database.  At first I thought there must be something fishy with our data, so I went to the source.  The USDA Plants database from which we obtain all of our plant data.  A search for spathiphyllum there also returns nothing.  Go ahead, try it: http://plants.usda.gov/java/nameSearch?keywordquery=Spathiphyllum&mode=sciname&submit.x=17&submit.y=7.

So what gives?  This evening Bob hypothesized over quesedillias that Is this actually a tropical plant that doesn't grow natively anywhere in the US, and that's why the USDA doesn't catalog it.  It remains a mystery at the moment....

Rest assured, we're looking into this kind of stuff.  We sincerely want Greenthumbr to be the place to go for thorough, high-quality plant and information - both user generated and from scientific sources.

Interesting. I wonder why that is.

nice! that's the way i would prefer it. for some reason i thought comma's wouldnt work yet lol.

Heya Travis! We need to add some helpful text near the tagging box, but...

To separate multiple tags, use a comma.

This allows you to have a space inside the tag.

You might've had more success tagging it with

"timelapse, experiment, flipbook, flash, swf" using the commas. Or, depending on what you're attempting, maybe "timelapse experiment, flipbook, flash, swf", which would be the 2-word tag of "timelapse experiment", and 3 single-word tags of "flipbook", "flash" and "swf".

i couldnt post a topic with the following tags

"timelapse experiment flipbook flash swf"

but could with

"timelapse experiment"

hope that's helpful

thankx bob, i know it's kinda early for askn bout that stuff, but i figure there will be some people like me that live for visual yum

Hiya Travis-- yeah, I think we'll definitely be making commenting richer, to allow for images. We haven't given any thought to video yet, as far as I know.

i was wanting to respond to June's post with a picture.. i don't know how often that would be used, but thought i'd mention it.. video response even b coolio too..

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

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.

Thanks, we'll take a look at it. We know currently it's awkward that you can only pick a profile photo for images you've already uploaded. We'll be making it easier to upload a new photo from the pick-your-photo page soon.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hi guys - this all looks great.  I had a little trouble changing my image.  That could be that I am technophobe.  But Lance agreed that it was a bit obscure.  Anyway, I'm letting you know.  That's it!

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!

Thanks for letting me know. I'll have to replant that rosemary now! Really, it's not a big deal. Just last night I did some cleanup trying to eliminate places where you could muck with my private stuff. Looks like I missed a spot or two.

I dragged out the hammer and drill gun, and I beileve that both the garden page and the Shovelpunks page that you noted in another journal entry have been repaired. At least temporarily. It seems that removing a plant which I have referenced in my journal makes things go awry.

Thanks for the excellent testing and feedback.

It looks like, when you destroyed my Rosemary, things got a little wonky. I've monkey patched it so it should be working again, but you've definitely exposed a bug here. We'll try not to let that happen again! :)

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

When click Communities from the menu, the page is titled Groups.  No biggie, but if click on the Shovelpunks group I am getting an error message -

Lance - just destroyed your Really Excellent Rosemary.  Sorry about that...

 

Is there a way to prevent me from uprooting your entire landscape?

 

Tried to go back to your Garden by clicking Garden / Lance's Garden && got an error page.

 

 

Just read Bob's very interesting post about Compost Tea.  Clicked the link to Digitaria (crabgrass) and ended up on a plants/species page with a large number of crabgrasses listed.  But I found that if I click the Plants link from the upper menu the Species and Horticulture links are missing. 

 

Would also be way cool to have small pcitures of each next to the names in those species lists...

 

Thanks!

Would be nice to have a reference page for folks who love to garden but are unfamiliar with technical terms such as rss feeds, tags, dashboards, etc.

( Spellcheck in posts would also be very cool )

 

Great site - thanks for the invite!

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.