Nice site - Easy to sign up

Nice job, Scott and you certainly were quick about it. Registration was fast and easy and non intrusive. Nice ability to format your comments. Simple format. Only problem I see is a lot of white background. Nice to know someone could start this forum up just like that. Hope you get some people checking it out at least. I wonder if you might expand to Fruit and Veggies?

Liz

Hi Liz, glad the sign-up worked. Most of the time doing the install was spent figuring out how to get those email notifications to work. The site has many configuration options, maybe one can change the background. Its also open source so if nothing else you can change the code to do what you want.

Scott

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There, I just changed the background color. You can set all the colors to anything you want!

Scott

Scott,

The seed is planted. Now comes the nurturing. Setup was a breeze.

Mike

I like it, nice format.

Thank you, Scott.

Scott and all, what would you think of changing the description of the forum to “all aspects of fruit and nut growing” instead of just “fruit growing”? My primary interest is fruit, but my preference would be for this forum to also include nuts.

Looks good. Just one note on the activation email. The URL for the activation comes through with the webesmiths.com domain and now that I’m on the site that remains the domain. It shows me logged in here, but if I go to growingfruit.org I’m not logged in. Not a big deal at this point, but might be confusing long-term.

Floyd, I changed the description.

zendog, when I originally built it I put it on that webesmiths domain (thats my home internet) and it looks like I will need to rebuild to fully reset to the new domain.

Scott

Okay, no issue to me, but thought I would mention it.

Thanks Scott! This could work. It must have been a fair amount of work for you and I appreciate it.

I was OK with the GW site, and even with the new Houzz site I think I could be OK too, but this clean break, and ultra simple, user friendly site, might be the ticket. Good job.

Mark

Hi Mark, it was not actually that much work to set up. It uses a new technology called Docker which means you just type a couple things and wait 10 minutes and its all up! What took all the time was the website needs to send emails and the computer it is sitting on I had not yet configured to be able to send emails out.

I think the main thing this site could prove useful for is the Houzz folks know how easily we could just “hop off” so it helps keep the pressure on them to make us happy. I’m going to keep it up and people are welcome to post things, I’ll be checking in here.

Scott

I have a suggestion to help us have quick access to a user’s zone and maybe a little background. After playing around with the various options in my account preferences, it seems the easiest way to give people quick info about your zone, etc. is through the “About Me” field.

When you put information in this field, it shows up in the pop-up panel when someone clicks on your name or icon. You can click on my little icon (the dog) or name to see how it works.

I know some of you have already done this, but it would be great to have that “one click” access to zone, etc. for all of you who are comfortable sharing the info. You can also fill in your zone information on the Preferences page, but currently that doesn’t show until you go to a user’s full profile, so I think it is helpful to add it in this blurb as well.

For those who need a little assistance with this here is a simple way to do it:

  1. Click on your little icon on the top right-hand corner of the page.

  2. Select “Preferences” from the little drop down list.

  3. Fill in the field labeled “About Me” - you may need to scroll down to see it.

  4. After completing your entry, scroll to the bottom of the page and hit “Save Changes.”

  5. To preview it, just go to any of your posts or in the main display where you see the user icons and click on your icon. You may want to edit for length if it is truncated.

You can also put a link in this section to take people to one of your posts. While I put a link to the crab apple scion I am offering, I was thinking it would mostly be helpful to have a link to the little bios people have written in the thread started by Alan. Someday that thread may scroll away, but this way everyone would have instant access to your background which I know I find fascinating and would hate to see disappear.

To add a link in your “About Me” section:

  1. First you need to get the URL (aka the web address) you want to include as a link. You can get the URL for a specific post (such as your mini-bio in Alan’s thread) by click on the hyperlink icon below that post. The icon is supposed to be a little chain but I think it looks more like a diagonal 8 or infinity sign.

  2. When you click on that hyperlink icon, a pop-up box comes up with the specific link. Copy that text (control C on PC an command C on Mac). It should come up as already highlighted, but if it doesn’t you will need to select the text before copying.

  3. Now that you have the text copied. Go to your “About Me” entry in Preferences as described above and enter the text you would like to have as the link in your “About Me” text. In my case I wrote “Want crabs?”

  4. Highlight that text, then click the hyperlink icon above the entry box for “About Me” and paste the URL in the little pop-up box that comes up (control V on PC or command V on Mac). Make sure not to include the http:// that is already included in the pop-up box, since the link you just copied already includes that and the link won’t work correctly if you have that twice.

  5. Scroll to the bottom of your Preferences and select “Save Changes”.

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Thats a good tip zendog. I was looking for a way for the zone info to appear there automatically but its not an option the site allows in its current form.

Scott

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