Site Help: Time to voice your opinion on what columns to keep/drop, 2 by Kaelkitty

Kaelkitty wrote:
Hi everyone,

I agree with Sallie - I also use the entries column to see which plants need more information, though not all the time as my work flow is more often FROM the photographs I have taken TO my journal, rather than the other way around. What I really want to echo though, is the comment about Begin Date! The disappearance of the Year from the Begin Date was occurring BEFORE the major changes last year - it looks like it attempts to "word wrap" the date but it is cutting off the year when that goes down to the second line - it is a PAIN! Sallie did make a mistake though - it is not happening in view by status - the year word wraps and is still visible then, it is happening in Search and it always has! You can see an example of this in the third photo I have added to this post.

What IS happening in View by Status is that when you click on "Click here to prepare the items on this page for printing" all you get is a blank page headed Items of status: "Unknown" in a large font and nothing else. The URL for the blank page is http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/printbystatus.php?statu... What is even weirder is that if you are in a Category and you click on "Click here to prepare the items on this page for printing" you get Viewing all items and it displays what I think is your whole journal (NOT the items in the category where you clicked) in some random order under the URL http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/printbycat.php?cat=5049...

Another thing I've been meaning to mention about dates is this bit of weirdness. Have look at the sample pictures attached - the first one is viewing an entry and you can't see the start date unless you type it into your initial comments! In fact, often the ONLY way you can see your actual start date for an entry, FROM THE ENTRY is to edit it, as shown in the second photo. This can be very dangerous as it is then possible to change something by accident which may lead to loss of data.

In particular, anything you type within double quotation marks around it will disappear when an entry is edited - I find this particularly annoying as I use double quotes to distinguish between descriptive names I have made up for a plant and formal cultivar names as I don't want to find myself passing on incorrect names to other people. When you look at the second plant down in the third picture you will see just such an entry - if I edited the entry JFS0435 "small grey leaves" Adromischus ? the text "small grey leaves" will disappear from the entry upon opening the edit screen and then if you save it without noticing the missing text and replacing it, you have lost the information.

Another thing which bugs me is that at the moment the behavior of the words in the orange headers on the entry pages is very inconsistent. You have 4 headers as follows:
Initial Comments: (No Date - it SHOULD inherit and display the "Begin Date")
Oct 11, 2006: Action I performed : [This is fine]
Sep 15, 2013: Status Update [This is fine]
Aug 10, 2007: TODO (This is now UNREADABLE you have a red TODO on an orange background - all you can see is the date on a blank orange bar! This should be a simple fix - change the word colour to Black or Blue, or change the bar colour to green or blue - I'd prefer the latter as I find the orange obnoxious for my eyesight)

Finally, I'd like to get some of the other journal users opinions on the drop down box for What type of entry is this? "Action I performed" has always confused me and I muddle it with "Status Update" at times. I'd like to be able to distinguish between things I do (like repotting which would be "Action I performed") and things the plant does (maybe call it Observation) (flowering, setting seed, etc). In my head "Status Update" doesn't mean that - I associate it ONLY with changing the value in my status column and sometimes when the plant does something it changes Status and sometimes it doesn't - My current statuses are Bulbs Planted, Dead, Dormant, Dug & Stored, Extinct, General, Germinated, Healthy, On Order, Out of Stock, Propagated, Seed Sown, Sick, Unknown, and Finished. What do other people use?

Half the time if something changes Status (ie going from seed sown to germinated often doesn't get an entry, I just use the checklist to make the Status change every few days because it is a process rather than a definable event (unless you have only one seed!) If I have photos of the germination process I would prefer to put those photos under the heading of "Observation" but having a plant die on me is a change of status I would actually record with an entry. On the other hand, if a "Healthy" plant is flowering it doesn't change status but probably does get a photo and an entry - but this is not a entry I am happy calling "Action I performed" OR "Status Update".

I'd like to propose adding the possibility of "Observation" or something of similar meaning to the list in the drop down box for What type of entry is this?: I'd really like to hear what other people think about this idea and how they use the Type of Entry choices at present. I would especially like to know which one should be the default (ie the one at the top of the list should be the one you use most so you only have to change it when you need a different type of entry)

Anyway, I think that is more than enough from me to be going on with. I look forward to hearing from you all,

Ciao, KK.