Journal corrections go here

Thanks, I'll take a look.

I checked the last two tests I did on my blog and they still show dates of Wednesday, December 31, 1970. I sure was not old enough to write blog entries then. Haha. Hopefully, a fix will come soon for that.

But I am so glad your journal is working for you SallieKR. :D

Editing to say that a new entry has the correct date, so maybe I can fix the other ones??

This message was edited May 20, 2016 8:24 AM

One thing I did notice in my blog when i tried to fix some of the wonky dates was that I had to back off a year to get the year I wanted. Found this by fluke. I was using dates just to sort the order of things, not for any real meaning so managed to do what I wanted.

Yes, I had to edit the date on about 25 (so far) new Journal entries. The fix doesn't correct past errors, so you'll have to manually fix them :-(

SallieKR, I feel your pain with the journal.

Here's the long and the short of it: the journal is among our very oldest features. It's very detailed and (for lack of a better word), the coding is both fickle and fragile. Every time we've tried to work on it, we've mucked it up. As I recall, Dave made at least one attempt to try to make it more user-friendly, but quickly abandoned those efforts because it was just too thorny (and even then, there wasn't enough of a user base to justify the time he would have spent on it.)

When we went to a defined page width several years ago, replacing the outdated ever-expanding pages we had previously), that caused us to evaluate and prioritize journal columns/fields to display. I think I made it clear at the time, but if I didn't, I will own up to puling the trigger on the PID column in favor of the pictures. In retrospect, it was probably not the right field to give up, but there were no clear "good" choices.

And the number of people who actually use the journal feature remains very small - probably smaller now because of the issues with it.

Those of you who do use the journal are very passionate about that and on weekly calls, we've talked about how we hate to disappoint you. But we just haven't been able to devote resources to fixing it - even if we dedicated dozens (or hundreds) of tech hours to fixing it the rather decrepit structure, the fact is that it is still a very difficult feature to navigate for the average user; most people who try it don't get past making a few tentative entries before calling it quits.

I'm not sure what the answer is - an online garden journal is a great idea. But this one just never really got out of the starting gate. I hope that won't turn you completely away from DG, because we need/want community members to continue to challenge us to provide you with features that help you garden better.

Thanks Terry! Glad to see you're still around! I've looked at other gardening sites, and *nobody* has anything even close to the journal function here. It's sad that more people haven't figured out how to create and use a journal. Just about a week ago I sent a link to my category of plants I'm giving away this year to a friend. When she came over to pick up some plants, the first thing she said was how impressed she was with the journal. She'd never heard of DG before, and I told her I'd show her how to use the site some day when we have more time.

When the dates got messed up about a month ago, that would have been the last straw for me if it hadn't been fixed. It took me a couple of days to fix most of the bad dates, and I'm still finding a few I missed. But... thank goodness it's fixed! Other problems are comparatively minor, and I can live with them. The most irritating bug to me right now, which was introduced recently due to site redesign changes, is the journal search results display- photo 1 & 2. I don't know why the "Today's Features" column was added to the right side of the screen (or maybe it was there before, but I didn't notice it because it didn't interfere with my journal work.) It's really irritating to have to go to the bottom of the page to scroll right to be able to see the links in the "Actions" column. Then, after scrolling right, the 1st column with the image disappears. When I'm working on my journal, I have no interest in "Features". That's what the Home page is for!

Also, you mentioned the removal of a PID column. I'm not sure what that was. The "Entries" column was removed from the view by category, but it's still there when viewing by status, and the image column is missing. That makes viewing by status pretty worthless for me! Photo 3.

I'm unable to click and see my second and third photos on journal entries enlarged. I've noticed this for about a week now. The first photo will enlarge when you click it, but nothing comes up when I click the second and third.

This is a long time problem when viewing a journal in "external mode", ie: if your journal is shared and someone else is trying to view it. It also happens if you click the thumbnail of the plant to view the journal entry instead of clicking "View" in the Actions column to the far right. This happens because clicking the thumbnail puts you in "external mode".

Edited to add: I think this could also happen if you're not logged in. You'd then probably only be able to view your journal in external mode.

This message was edited Jun 23, 2016 9:17 AM

Today it seems to be working fine. I was logged in at the time, I do know that.

I would like to see some fields for plant specs (spacing, light, pests, etc.) attached to the original entry like the information that shows in the columns, but it would not have to show in the columns. I am entering my seeds in, and then 'clone' them when I start them, but if put notes or change the date then it overrides whatever comments I had in the 'seeds' category.

I hope this makes sense, and sorry if this already exists somewhere and I overlooked it!

Thank you!

You can put extra info in any number of entries after making item and each entry will have it's own date. The original and the clones can keep the date that you first put in, on the main entry. Milestones can be very helpful also.