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.

 

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?

 

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.

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.

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.

i couldnt post a topic with the following tags

"timelapse experiment flipbook flash swf"

but could with

"timelapse experiment"

hope that's helpful

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..

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!

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.

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!

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.