As many of you will know, I've been a member or the board for a little over 18 months - hardly a long time, but I value the effort that goes into many of the posts, and you are the logical group to consult in matters related to gardening.

I was discussing the web-based application that I'm building with a friend recently, and she suggested that I make it available to the public. Its still in the planning stages - please note that I'm not trying to drum up business, simply elicit feedback. I dont need any credit card numbers, but I do need to know if its worth considering her suggestion.

This is rough, but it should give you an idea of where I'm going:

1. Plant database, including photos of each plant at different stages (e.g. 6" pot, after 1 year, after 5 years)

2. Individual 'My Garden' section : allow people to keep their garden diary, plans, photos etc in one place. Automatic hyperlinking to the 'Search' function (see below) would mean that users have instant access to plants referenced in diary entries etc.

3. Forums - focus on Australian Natives, but we'll have one for exotics too :)

4. Another option is an FAQ, where answers to the most regularly asked questions are collated, preferably via inout from 'recognised experts' and regulars alike.

5. Search function, tying all of the above together. For example, if I search for 'Acmena Smithii', I might retrieve links to :
- the Acmena entry in our plant database
- photos from several 'My Garden' pages
- diary entries from same
- forum and FAQ entries containing 'Acmena Smithii'

None of this is rocket science, and I'm sure that there are other people out there who could put it together, but havent done so simply because it isnt seen as a financially viable project. Money isnt my primary motive - I envisage using this application as part of my resume (I'm a professional Web Developer). If it came down to running it in conjunction with Rockhampton Council, and seeking sponsorship from community groups, then that would be fine. I'm not keen on popup ads, but I recognise that ad revenue is another possibility. Opening it up to the wider community opens a can of worms, not the least of which is copyright on any images posted to the site and the possible legal implications of providing advice which may or may not give you the best native garden in Australia ...

My weak-kneed objections aside, I'd appreciate any feedback you could give me. Does this project sound like something you'd be drawn to, assuming I can gain hosting support, and given that you havent seen a single page I've designed ? Can you suggest other functionality which the site might offer - for example, I'd love to be able to provide users with the ability to draw up basic landscape plans online, but its not an immediate priority. For mine, the ability to collate the garden images, thoughts, milestones (successes *and* failures) that live on so many hard drives is the number one priority. GardenWeb's Photo Gallery illustrates the delight that many of us take in seeing other people's gardens, and that is driven home at every Open Garden I've visited.

Thanks,

Artie

Myrtle Beech

Diuris

Plum pine

River Red

It's really easy to contribute to and add pictures, and they don't mind how many pictures you add (as long as the pictures can be used by everyone and anyone).

1. Native Plant database might be good, but as a supplement or linking to other databases, for example, http://members.ozemail.com.au/~peterrjones/plants.html
http://farrer.csu.edu.au/ASGAP/gallery.html#list
http://www.anbg.gov.au/anbg/index.html

2. Individual 'My (Native) Garden' section would be a great idea.

3. Forums - we're in one now - do we really need another - could that spread the usual suspects too thinly on the ground?

4. FAQ would be great - a lot of the same questions get asked on this forum, and it would be good to be able to refer queries to a database of previous answers.

5. Search function would be great - one reason would be as for 4 above - to avoid having to repost the same answers to the same questions.

Cheers,
Frank

Roy

first up where in qld is alabama? if i might ask.

1.. plant data base, i reckon a good data base is going to take a lot of room on a web site that is if you are going to list the many plants that we can grow here in the sunshine state. so adding plants growths in stages will make that so much larger. for the main i think viewers will be looking for identifiacation and planting and care help.

2.. sounds like a lot of work to manage

3.. for me gardeners are well serviced with forums not long ago an aussie garden forum dissapeared due to lack of interest if i can put it that way. you are in a native plants forum here and it isn't over patronised a good crowd here though.

4.. faq's yes they are always handy for all gardeners but they need to be relevent to the point answers and the search engine for the faq's need to lead people to the answer they may be looking for many search engines like this for me just don't hit the mark unless you type in exactly the topic line as the author of the faq's has put it.

5.. again search engines for plant i'd's often for me come up short they are not broad enough in their data base and not all the common names are in the search engine that is the big fall down when someone is looking to i'd a plant.

you mentioned advdertising as fund raising and a site like you mention probably isn't going to be cheep and guess you will ahve a domain name and it will need to be registered as a business type site for you isp to support it, but if you go to pop ups which is the trend many will not return to your site as often as you would like them to. and on the other hand if you ask for a subscription fee there will be many out there especially agrdeners who will not patronise the site because they can't afford the fees.

i would use a web page that had a comprhensive data base of plants as yet i haven't found it and they can be very slow to navigate around you may need to keep in mind there are still lots of people on slow old dial up. for me my quickest reference point is my out of date plant books. if you see or have something not that common and you can't find it in the books you can flick through the pages and generally turn it up lots easier than online bases.

and pic's in a lot of data bases leave a lot to be desired they can cause more confussion than the help they are supposed to be poorly taken pics and not enough detail to,leaf form and flower/seed shapes and waht the seedling for particularly a tree may look like.

hope some of this objective observations help yo set up the best web site yet.

oh my favourite initials K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid).

len

mail len

lens garden page

To answer your questions/observations:

Q0. first up where in qld is alabama? if i might ask.

A. Its a little known suburb of Rocky :) OK, I tried to change my preferences, and was rewarded with an error from the web server. C'est la Vie.

Q1. plant data base, i reckon a good data base is going to take a lot of room on a web site that is if you are going to list the many plants that we can grow here in the sunshine state. so adding plants growths in stages will make that so much larger. for the main i think viewers will be looking for identifiacation and planting and care help.

A. I agree that the majority of users will want the text relating to plant culture, but I also envisage providing *links* from the main database entry to allow them to view photos of the plant at different stages of its life. Personally, I find it frustrating trying to envisage the 'true' size of many plants from the label, and the '12-month' estimate is something I think many people would value (granted, conditions and growth rates vary enormously, but I think you know where I'm going with this).

Q2.. sounds like a lot of work to manage

A2. I absolutely agree, and its part of my reluctance to make this available to the outside world. There are a broad range of issues relating to security that I havent even touched on, but that goes with the territory. Removing the need to maintain all but the most basic membership data (name, username, location and email address) will minimise my concerns in this area, but I dont want to spend my days weeding out SPAM etc - hopefully, we are dealing with a better class of people :)

Q3.. for me gardeners are well serviced with forums not long ago an aussie garden forum dissapeared due to lack of interest if i can put it that way. you are in a native plants forum here and it isn't over patronised a good crowd here though.

A3. My broader aim is to help gardeners in their attempt to fuse natives with exotics - correct plant choice, companion planting and so on. This wont amuse the local provenance diehards, but it may just lessen the resistance to something with the word 'Native' in the masthead, and we might see more lillipillies and Austormyrtus alongside Gardenias and Camellias throughout Oz. I cant predict whether the site will have a longterm future - I can only put it out there and hope that people like yourself are prepared to give it a go.

Q4.. faq's yes they are always handy for all gardeners but they need to be relevent to the point answers and the search engine for the faq's need to lead people to the answer they may be looking for many search engines like this for me just don't hit the mark unless you type in exactly the topic line as the author of the faq's has put it.

A4. The whole search engine thing is a big topic - you can customise Google to have it restrict its search to your site, and I'm confident that there are other options which will give us access to the content we require for a given topic.

Q5.. again search engines for plant i'd's often for me come up short they are not broad enough in their data base and not all the common names are in the search engine that is the big fall down when someone is looking to i'd a plant.

A5. This is where my database background kicks in, and it may be an area where I'll raise the ire of some. If you look at the label which accompanies most plants, or the entry for same in any of your books, its designed for humans to read in paragraph form. If you wanted to input that description into my database, I'd have you filling out a form, just as you do when Amazon wants your credit card details. Some fields would be mandatory (the botanical name, for one), and others optional (common name), but it then becomes a reasonably trivial task to write code to find entries without common names (or 'area of origin', 'soil type' etc) - the hard yakka then comes when I have to chase these details and update the database, but what use is a site if its core data isnt right/complete ?

6. you mentioned advertising as fund raising and a site like you mention probably isn't going to be cheap and guess you will have a domain name and it will need to be registered as a business type site for you isp to support it, but if you go to pop ups which is the trend many will not return to your site as often as you would like them to. and on the other hand if you ask for a subscription fee there will be many out there especially agrdeners who will not patronise the site because they can't afford the fees.

A6. Agree 100% Len - its either community-based, or advertising. I dont want my credit card billed every month/3 months whatever, and I appreciate that many members are retirees on a fixed income, but the money will have to come from somewhere. I also have no interest in paying one of the credit card verification services each month. BHG, Burke's Backyard and GA all have magazine revenues to support their sites - my project has no such good fortune :)

Q7. i would use a web page that had a comprehensive data base of plants as yet i haven't found it and they can be very slow to navigate around you may need to keep in mind there are still lots of people on slow old dial up. for me my quickest reference point is my out of date plant books. if you see or have something not that common and you can't find it in the books you can flick through the pages and generally turn it up lots easier than online bases. and pic's in a lot of data bases leave a lot to be desired they can cause more confussion than the help they are supposed to be poorly taken pics and not enough detail to,leaf form and flower/seed shapes and waht the seedling for particularly a tree may look like.

A7. Len, if I cant give you a fast, reliable database (yes, even over a 56K dialup modem), then I'll give the game away. I currently work on a website which serves several hundred thousand pages each day, to people across the world, many on 56K modems - admittedly, we have some beefy hardware, but its more about how you design your pages than the size of your server, IMO. Ours put textual content first - as I mentioned earlier, links to images make it easier for users to choose whether or not they want to view them. Ideally, I'd love to include botanical drawings of each plant, but I'm unsure as to the copyright implications of this, and I suspect that there wont be a drawing of every plant in our database. I think we've all spent time searching vainly for (clear) images of plants on Google, but we've also seen some spectacular photography right here in the Photo Gallery - where there is a will, there is a way.

Q8. hope some of this objective observations help yo set up the best web site yet. oh my favourite initials K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid).

Thanks again, Len - I may even put your initials in the masthead as a reminder to myself when I'm struggling to put this thing together :)

Again, thanks to all who have taken the time to give me some feedback - most appreciated. I will build the database and the web-based frontend to it, but any grander plans will depend on whether or not I can see a future for it in the wider community. As Len has already pointed out, we are a relatively small group within a much larger gardening community. Hopefully, the appeal of Australian natives extends well beyond the regulars on this forum - anything that we can do to extend that appeal has to be a good thing.

Cheers,

Artie

What don't you like about Wikipedia? You need to address some issues before I would consider contributing:

a) how are you going to provide the required bandwidth
b) what do you offer than PlantNET doesn't
c) who owns the data
d) what stops subtle vandalism
e) what happens when you get bored
f) why should I contribute

Wikipedia has these answers:
a) it is useful enough to enough people that rich people foot the bill
b) Wikipedia is cross-linked with all kinds of other data
c) the data must be signed away with the GFDL
d) Wikipedia has spent a lot of time working out the best solution to this, and deals with far more concerted efforts than you'll have
e) Wikipedia has no problem with maintainership for much the same reason as a)
f) Wikipedia has a strong sense of contributor value and people know it will be around in 5 years.

I've seen people in the FOSS community try to do what you are proposing here in other realms, and invariably they fail for one of the reasons implied above. I'm more likely to continue to contribute Wikipedia articles as a result, and I am willing to bet that unless you can find a strong reason for f) the project will fail.

I tried many years ago to write a FOSS program to maintain exactly the sort of database you propose, but I found it really hard to find a good database schema for handling things like growth habit. I'd want to see your proposal before spending too much time inputing data.

Don't get me wrong, I want you to succeed, but I've been involved with far too many FOSS projects to expect anything :)

ok not that long ago we spent 6 years in rocky in the postal system, i'll ask me lovely later as she was more into the delivery side and i have never heard of 'alabama' so without giving too much away where abouts in rocky is it?

we lived an kalka shades when we were there of course it was kalka heights then hey lol.

sounds like you have a good handle on the expectations of others of a good web site, and i know in general web designers work in frames and that is the real slow down process for older machines and dial up, the best sites i have seen offer an option of opening in frames or opening without frames.

it would be good for all of us dirt workers to have a site that does the job well. with online pictures and this is the real big fall down, they are often taken too far away often the lighting isn't the best or no enhancing has been doen, they leaf structure/set up isn't easily seen as is the same with buds, flowers and seed pods then there is the trunk/bark structure i understand pics are in 1 dimension but they then need to be dislpayed to create a 3 dimensionmal image in the mond of the seeker of knowledge in other words 1 or 2 pics of the subject matter often doesn't fit the bill as is in the whats currently available..

so good luck in the venture, keep us informed.

len

Again, thank you for your extensive feedback, and you've raised a lot of issues that I do need to address, but I need to make one thing perfectly clear from the start. This project is designed to meet *my* requirement for a central, web-based repository for all things gardening - at least, all the things I value in *my* garden. I know this sounds selfish, but thats the way that it is - I've gone in search of feedback to determine whether or not my friend's suggestion re taking it to a larger audience has any merit. I do take your point re. 'reinventing the wheel', and it would clearly be redundant to re-enter data that may exist in Wikipedia and other online resources, but I suspect that our aims may differ. My database wouldnt suit botanists or hardcore horticulturalists - I'm not going to have fields describing the leaf structure (thats where the images/drawings would be invaluable) or the other minutiae which you would find useful. I *will* have a field where users can enter the URLs to pages containing more detailed information, but the basic idea of the plant database is to give the home gardener the basic information she needs to make an informed choice. By making the diaries from 'My Garden' part of the search target, we can give other gardeners an insight into the trials and triumphs associated with each of their prospective choices under 'real world' conditions.

You also mentioned that many Open Source (ok, FOSS) projects never really get off the ground, and I suspect that is simply the nature of the beast. As a code-cutter, I know how it is - wild enthusiasm and a thousand ideas at the start, fatigue and "thank God thats done" by the 'end'. Add in continued requests for changes/enhancements from users who dont seem to comprehend the degree of effort required, and its a formula for disappointment. I've already alluded to the fact that I'm hesitant to take on the maintenance of this app - I do have a day job - but I've promised myself that it will become a reality, even if there is only ever one user.

Cheers,

Artie

I'm also trying to think of ways of adding information relevant to my current obsession of Australian native produce. A section for notes on edibility and preparation of a plant's edible sections, and for how to grow the plant for its edible purposes, would be fabulous from my perspective.

These notes would need to be separate from the ordinary growing notes, I feel; for example, the boab plant (Adansonia Gregorii) won't grow unprotected to treehood in Sydney, but it's possible the 10-week old vegetable version (the roots and leaves are eaten) will (I'm still testing this theory :) ).

What would be an ideal for me is the ability to download the database files (for those who were interested) to my own computer and add to them as I go, and then do a batch upload of my additions to the central online database at intervals. I'm aware this will definitely cause some versioning issues in some cases but it's not an insurmountable problem, depending on how you'd want to allow people to add their own comments/pictures/etc on a plant anyway.

With a database model like this one, I'd be happy to pay a nominal fee for using the home-computer-based service, to support the ease of use, and have the online viewing service, maybe with limited online updating services, available for free.

In terms of models for subscriptions/payment services, the inter-library loan models could work - I'm happy to go into more detail offlist if anyone's interested. Basically, however, limited viewing information is either free or avaiable for a very nominal fee, full viewing and editing access is subscription-based, and those who make their local holdings available for upload/copying get a reduction on their subscription fees - in essence, are paid to keep their information regularly updated.

Another model for transferring/sharing information, completely separate to this one, could be the P2P model, where information is shared between the multiple computers and doesn't reside in a single place on the web. This would spread the potential load but makes the information more vulnerable to local computer temperamentalities.

Sorry if that's too geeky an information dump!! :)

1. I had considered a 'Bush Tucker' forum, and a field relating to the edibility of various parts of a plant, but I fear that every page with this sort of imformation would need a 3-foot high disclaimer warning people *not* to start chowing down on anything which looks like the plant in question - as I've said before, my paranoia is eclipsed only by the diligence with which lawyers will pursue a case.

2. Your suggestion re a client-side application which allowed you to maintain your own database, and import/export data as required, certainly has merit, but its one more layer of maintenance. The beauty of web delivery is that I only need to target a certain range of browsers - the underlying operating system really isnt a concern - and upgrades dont require users to download new software (and run the risk of installing a Trojan horse or other virus, in the worst case scenario). That said, I'd certainly be willing to offer things like CSV downloads, where you'd have the data in a format that you could import straight into a spreadsheet, MS Access or whatever. I take your point re service providers periodically taking their systems down for maintenance (and other Net related issues), but my experience has been that our (commercial) site has less than .01% downtime each year - I may not be able to replicate that if my ISP cant give me 24/7, but I dont envisage the site being unavailable during peak surfing periods in Oz - I guess only time will tell.

3. I'll need to look further into your 'shared load' model - I know that the SETI project uses this for number-crunching, but I'm not sure how well it would apply to my project. As I mentioned earlier, I'm being pretty selfish (and concise) with the requirements, and any support I receive from the public is simply icing on the cake. This is completely at odds with the methodology that I would use if I needed your financial support, but I think that its very much inline with the KISS principle that Len alluded to earlier.

Cheers,

Artie

Data in CSV format for managing on one's own computer would probably be more than adequate for basic purposes, I reckon, should people want that sort of thing. Your point about compatability is also well-noted - esp. given that I run a Mac at home, Windows at work, and all that sort of thing ... the joy of the web is the removal of precisely those sorts of issues! (And I can see PDA-based applications not far down the track, where someone can photograph, comment on, and instantly upload something wonderful they've found in a remote corner of their property!).

Previous people's suggestions of Wikis are good but the problem is the lack of standard (and therefore easily searchable) fields and hence layout. Full-text searching is all very well but doesn't allow for a lot of precision in one's search, to prevent getting too many hits. (Yes, I am a real librarian - does it show? :) ). Having a highly customised layout of the type you're presumeably suggesting means better standardisation and therefore more useful display and results.

Having said that, however, the Wiki or blogging software services now available might be adaptable to your "online update" purposes, and could save you a lot of backend coding time - particularly if some of them come with forum add-ons. (Unless, of course, this project is really a means for you to practice your own databasing skills :) - I've got one on ice like that!!).

Hope I'm not going too overboard on your pet idea :)

(apologies if a link has already been provided elsewhere)

I'm biased, i'm a moderator :) but it's a good source of info that is growing all the time. I believe Librarian might already be a member too :)