SeedFinders NewsFlash

Hi friends,

Here in SeedFinders new blog you will find important changings onto the SeedFinder as like as news from the connected shops, breeders and projects. If there will be new functions, or updates, or forums, shops or important changings on strains - here you should find some info about! (New strains onto the SeedFinder you will find HERE at the moment, but maybe we will also show our changelogs here into the blog later)

Maybe you've noticed, this is a blog without a lots of options, reduced to a minumum. But you are able to filter the articles for users, categories and/or tags... At the moment its not very useful, because there is only this single article, but maybe it can be a good option sometimes into future if we've stored lots of news written by many authors. With the help of this filters you are able to show only posts who was made by a particular writer, or only special offers, new strains and so one... But we will see ;)
Also we made a small comment-function for you, please feel free to add your comments or feedback (you don't need an account to do so). But if you have new suggestions or special problems, please use our mini-board.

We also prepared a RSS-Feed for you, you will find the link to the particular version (with or without filters) at the end of the page. If you like, simply add this rss-feed to your dynamic bookmarks in order to stay informed!

Ok, we will see how it will work, if there are any news - i will let you know about ;)

P.S.: You are a breeder/shop/professional and you like to add your news/infos/updates to this blog? Let us know and you will get a free account!

Ok, its not the freshest news, but before today there was also no place to post it ;) Since a few days the seedfinder is running on a new server, so i hope downtimes or slow loading times will not happen anymore into the next time :) We also have updated the apache and php by this way, so i hope the will be no errors and all the functions will work all right... If you find any error, please let me know about it!
By the way, the new server is a 4 x 2.2 GhZ machine with 4GB RAM, i think you will enjoy :) And if you do so, or if you like to honor our work - or if you like to have a cool t-shirt (in best case all together) - have a look to our apparel-support-area, maybe you find somthing there ;)

Up from now you are able to subscribe to this NewsFlash by EMail - or to follow us on Twitter if you like! On Twitter you will see all actual posts here in the blog, if you subscribe by Email you will get a daily mail with the full news (if there are any fresh ones). The Blog-Per-Mail-Function we realized with FeedBurner, it also will make it easy to receive content updates in My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Bloglines, and other news readers.

If you stumble upon a cool video with extended info or a report about a cannabis-strain - now you can connect it to the seedfinder! This videos will be shown directly below the strain-description where you can watch it! For the moment this option will work only with youtube, but some more video platforms will follow if needed! It's very simple and will work like our ThreadFinder, you only have to insert the video-id, select a preview-image and hit a button - ready! You will find the upload-link onto the strain-description-pages, bottom right, into the big green upload-bar for strain-info. This option will be also integrated into our CannaFox Marijuana Add-On soon.

Short info: Up from now you'll find here a page with the latest uploads from the last 2 weeks! For example pictures, reviews, videos and so one...

The breeders in the SeedFinder now have their own dynamic Strain- and Hybrid-Map! With this new feature you can visualize all the varieties, their parents (and their descendants) of a breeder. You can center the different strains, you come from there directly to the variety descriptions and you can generate more maps (for example for a parent) to quickly find similar strains. Tip: You are able to zoom, stretch or rotate the maps which can be quite helpful! The keyboard shortcuts for that you'll see in the legend, top left of the map.

The whole thing is still in beta, it works better here and there, but it can quickly be a little confusing if too many varieties appear on the map. But hey, it's a start, and at some point I may will find the time to optimize this maps a little further ;) If anyone like to help us to build an even more stylish and more usable visualization, just do it, onto http://thejit.org/ you can find the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit with which we have also crafted our own maps. There are also some other great opportunities for the presentation, but you will see - it's not quite as easy with a few hundred species in one single map ;)

Lots more has changed in recent weeks / months - even if you should have not noticed much of it, most have changed in the background. It was time to clean up a little bit, to bring some structure to the project and to prepare some stuff to make the future updates easier and faster for me ;) The ThanksGiving-Game for example ... From time to time the draw has been delayed a bit - simply because I have not found the time to do the raffle ... Well, I'm sorry, but this does not happen in the future, the draw is now automatic :) New (and visible) are the first "breadcrumbs" for the database - which facilitate the internal navigation - and by the way also google seems to like that ;) Over time this will spread through the entire SeedFinder, hope you will like this too :)

One more thing... Because we were always just on the cleanup we have also optimized our databases - be happy with the new, around 10 times faster query time ;) Yeah, its not a bad idea to have a look from time to time ;) Ok, that no matter for most requests onto our page, but if you view large genealogy trees or hybrid-maps it will be (hopefully) a little noticeable and some seconds faster than before! (And by the way I need only half of the ice for cooling the server.)

Well, I will not list everything here, the spring cleaning is still ongoing - and also some wicked new features will coming soon! Just one example: A giant wizard for strain selection - based only on the user reviews and quite configurable (with all the options from our strain review function)! But patience, patience - the majority is already done - but it will take a little while yet - then it'll be really, really cool ;=)

Allright, see you later,
klaas

Since tonight you'll see the new menu item "Strain-Browser" top left in the SeedFinder. When you click on it you should see a choice for all breeders and varieties if you do not have JavaScript turned off. This should save you some clicks and time, now you can go from anywhere quickly to all strain/beeder infos. Furthermore there is a new menu for the strain information and uploads. This menu will be shown directly under the strain-browser, on all pages with information about a specific variety and will also work without JavaScript ;) Using this new menu, you can quickly and easily identify and find all the uploaded information about a strain - and also the links to upload and add your own strain-info! This menu hopefully protects you against going loop ways and will help to find all the connected straininfo much easier than before :)

From now on we can show cannabis strain info and reviews arranged to climate zones according to the universal Köppen / Geiger climate classification. This system is based on the concept that native vegetation is the best expression of climate. Thus, climate zone boundaries have been selected with vegetation distribution in mind. It combines average annual and monthly temperatures and precipitation, and the seasonality of precipitation. We use our own database with the actual climate data from the past 23 years to calculate this zones, onto this way we can deliver an actual and fairly accurately image (onto a 0.5 ° lat/long grid). This allows us to collect and evaluate information like flowering times, yields and so one for the different regions - and in the ideal case, the future farmer may find suitable or unsuitable varieties better than ever before!

Click here to go to SeedFinders climate index page, all functions are working now, for example, you can already see all strains suitable for a particular climate zone in an ordered list by average rating. With the help of our climate zone picker you can also point your spot on a map to get the local climate (as well as suitable strains for this place). What's missing are a few custom maps, explanations and overviews for the individual climate zones, but the interested reader will find some more info here onto the pages of the University of Vienna (very detailed) or at Wikipedia (probably not as accurate, but a little easier).

PS: This feature replaces the old Outdoor Plant Finder and the previous classification of the ountdoor reviews to the latitude. Geo-coordinates are no longer displayed in the future, the flowering times will be now displayed also separately for northern and southern hemisphere.

Get weather data, possible months and cannabis-strains worldwide with seedfinders new climate options. You can see a longtime climate overview, usable months for growth and flowering and possible strains for the local climate for every point on the globe now. We also updated our climate specification system to a better integrative (ecophysiological) one! Here you will find all info.

We changed our doctype to HTML5 now! This will bring us some new options, but we hope thats not noticeable for the moment ;) Where we are headed, it can be shown in a first small example. We will integrate some new stuff step by step, but as a first step and example we have updated our strain clouds for aroma, taste and effect right now :) Until now we included our pie-charts as old-fashioned, big PNG files or with the google chart api - now we can deliver nice vector graphics as inline SVG. These not only look better and load faster, they also are even prettier scalable. Here is a good example: Acidic aroma-cloud with pie-chart for Mandala #1. (And some more onto the strain info page.) Check it out, and hopefully you will also see the piechart - but normally it should work with the most (actual) browsers. (If not - please send us a short message and we will see what we can do!)