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