PDB changes (?)

I'm guessing you want us to tell you when we encounter something that has been changed, in cae you didn't mean to change it? To that end, 2 changes I just encountered in the PDB:

1) Synonyms no longer have Botanary information or links; and

2) Genus and species names no longer allow you to click on them to see all the plants in the same genus/species. (Family names - oddly enough - still permit you to pull all the other plants in the family in.)

Intuitively, it would make more sense to prevent users from selecting the family name, since the search results are usually quite large. But being able to search for other plants in the same genus or species narrows down the list considerably in most instances (hostas, daylilies, etc. not withstanding.)

Thanks for the report, Terry. I fixed item #2 - they now work once again.

Item #1 will be fixed soon. This is part of my optimization.

Dave

Thanks, Dave. Here's another - this entry: http://plantsdatabase.com/go/55728/ has an image I submitted, and now it's not showing up...but I can see other images. Is it me, or something with the image?

That's very odd, Terry. The file is completely missing from the server (and it's not in my backup file). It's like it never existed.

I have not idea what happened. I removed the entry to the plant above, so if you still have the photo please upload again.

Hopefully that is an isolated incident.

dave

This message was edited Saturday, May 24th 8:27 AM

That was odd. Fortunately, I still had the images, so I uploaded the missing one, plus a closeup shot. Thanks again!

Me again. I've noticed the search is still posing some problems. For example, I went to the daylilies database and searched for 'Evelyn Castleberry' It returned results that included a rose named 'Evelyn' and when I clicked on THAT result, it couldn't find it.

Also, I've found that putting double quote marks (") around my search criteria isn't limiting the search to that particular phrase (e.g., "Evelyn Castleberry" returned the same 29 results as Evelyn Castleberry, no quotes.)

Right, I have some work to do with the search engine still. I had to optimize it, but that caused a few oddities to creap in.

The daylilies|hostas|tomatoes|etc database search is completely broken - currently it displays ALL plants, not the proper limited plant query. This will get fixed also, in due order.

Dave

Dave, here's another one that is possibly similar to mine: http://plantsdatabase.com/t/379379/ Note the missing image, and when you click on the hyperlink the entry itself: http://plantsdatabase.com/go/55676/ is also missing the image.

Interesting - this one is from the same day (April 21st) that the last one was. Something must have happened on April 21st whereby some pictures were lost. That was 8 days before our server crashed.

I'll investigate in the morning.

Dave

Dave, Bug_girl mentioned to me she's missing several that she loaded. http://plantsdatabase.com/imagesbyuser.php?user=Bug_Girl

I also noticed if you go to her member page and click on the "49 plants" that she loaded, only about half of them are there. The page is divided into 3 pages... but each page is the same.

The missing photos are not a problem since they can always be reloaded if they don't appear over time. However, the ones with the red x would have to removed or else it would double post.

Dave, at the risk of having you throw something at my head, here are two other outstanding to-do's:

1) Copyrights haven't been showing up on the new images submitted to the PDB. This is a fairly urgent/pressing issue since it'll require us to remove images that the member wants to re-submit with a copyright watermark.

2) Some members are still reporting that when they look at their member page, click on the entries or images they've created, it's chunked into "pages" but they can't browse past the first "page" - clicking on 2, 3, 4 or next doesn't go anywhere - the first page is the only one that will display.

Copyrights should now be fixed. If there are any problems with copyrights left after this, please let me know.

I'll look into the member page business.

dave

Dave? ... I can't add synonyms if they've already been listed under another entry. I had this problem before ... now it's back.

Sue,

Rather than using the technique you are currently using (which, in fact is broken and may not be fixed for a little while), scroll to the bottom of the page that contains the plant. At the bottom, click on "Edit this entry" and there you can edit syns 1-5.

dave

Thanks, Arsenic pointed that out to me and that seems to work okay. That's what I'll do. I can't remember what I wanted to add now :~

The old server is back at my house, and I'm digging through it trying to recover what I can. The harddrive is in bad shape with a lot of corrupted bits, but I -am- getting stuff.

There are around 130,000 images at DG, so I have written a program to go through each and every image on the old server, check to see if it exists on the new server, and, if not, take a note of it. I expect the script will run all night long, and when it is finished, I can pick out those few that were found to be missing on the new server.

In other words, the missing pictures from April 21st will be back on the server soon!

Dave

The pictures are back. There were 621 missing pictures, and there were all recovered.

Dave

ALL were recovered! That is wonderful! And I am noticing that the site is loading much faster for me now too.

Here's a small glitch reported to the Plants Database helpdesk: http://iris.plantsdatabase.com/search.php?search_text=globe+artichoke

This person apparently searched for Globe Artichoke while in the Iris PDB. The results came in fine, but if you try to click on any of the entries, you get an error message.

Terry if you are still on line check the recent imagines because a large number of photos appear as grey boxes, but I just added one without a problem.

I was offline after I posted this, but I'm guessing that the gray boxes were partially-loaded images.

They were not those partials, but a series of completely grey boxes, about 5 of them and then the rest were fine after that. It is probably fixed by now.

Those were partially-loaded images, and they are now gone. Very little of the actual image loaded, which caused the "gray box" effect.

They still appear in the newsletter 4 greys and a couple of red x's. I guess it was too late to for the newletter, but that is good that they are gone now.

Hmmmm. That was strange; I really thought I had deleted them before the newsletter ran :( But they are gone now - I think!!!

No red x's on my newsletter here - which images are you seeing those on?

Three red x's, one blank and four greys, I will try to forward my copy to your mail and you can look at them, because it would be time consuming to list them.

Looks like something happened in the transmission of the Plants Database newsletter to you (mine came through fine.)

Both newsletters have only the gray boxes where the images didn't load properly - no red x's, which typically indicate a broken link:

DG newsletter: http://davesgarden.com/nl.php?date=2003-06-15
PDB newsletter: http://davesgarden.com/nl.php?date=2003-06-15&site=pdb

I can't believe I did not know about the newsletter that has the forum information, I only knew about the database letter. It looks fine from the links. Maybe it is yahoo mail?

Dave, same problem as I posted on 6/14, only this time in the Daylilies database, with a search for Hibiscus: http://daylilies.plantsdatabase.com/search.php?forum=&search_text=Hibiscus - click on any image and you get an error report.

(I know you're probably sick of me reporting these, but I figure this way, you'll have a list of what you still need to look at.)