List Tradelist, TradeTracker or Journal bugs & ideas here!

As part of our beta test, several to-do's (and wish list items) started to emerge on these tools. Now that they're more prominent on the site, it's more likely that they will become more used and valued by members. Dave asked me to try to pull all the recommendations into a succinct list for him to consider and prioritize for implementation.

Please list your error reports, frustrations and ideas for tradetracker, tradelist and journals here. And please be sure to state WHICH tool you're talking about, and enough details for me to re-create your error.

I can't promise that EVERYTHING we recommend will be incorporated, but we all know that Dave is great at looking for ways to fulfill our requests and make the site as useful and user-friendly as possible

I'll bite. Some of this has been mentioned in the other thread but I'll consolidate it here.

Journal:
1. Could we get a link back to our main journal page in a few places in the journal? Maybe after editing, moving, or copying an entry? For example, after moving an entry a page comes up that says, "The item has been moved to the new category!" and offers to go to the entry, the new category, and old category. It would be nice to be able to get back to the main page without having to click the tab and then choosing my journal.

2. It would also be nice to have a link to our main journal page at the bottom of each category listing: http://davesgarden.com/journal/edit/viewbycat.php?cat=20381

Tradelist:
1. The entry options need to be matched to the Journal. At the moment there is no cultivar blank in the tradelist entry so it really messes with transferring from tradelist to journal and journal to tradelist.

2. Another thing is the "Latin Name" blank in the tradelist. The search only looks at the "entry name" and "genus" when searching. When manually entering an entry in the Tradelist, you actually have to put the Genus AND species in the blank for Genus, if you want the search to find the full latin name. It is a weird quirk, because when looking at my tradelist and viewing an entry, the whole latin name (genus & species as entered in their respective blanks) will be listed under the "latin" heading, like it should. I hope that makes sense.

Last, but not least is the option to copy an entry from the PDB to the journal or tradelist. I know Dave already has this on his list of things to do, but just had to throw it in this, because I still can't wait for it to be implemented.

That's all I have at the moment, but I will look over the journal and tradelist again later to see if I missed anything.

Thanks,
Staci

Bumping this over here from an earlier thread.....
Journal
...really enjoying the new format, but it reminded me to ask about a journaling irritant...When I go to an existing entry and want to look all my entries for that item, some items have a looooong list of "This plant is in the Plants Database!" that you have to scroll through to get there...especially on stuff like tomatoes, corn, beans, etc. Maybe this has been addressed and you could direct me to the thread, or is it something that we could opt out of in preferences or in the journal set-up??? It's nice the first time, but gets tedious to look out every single time you go in there. ;p) TIA Janet

Love the new format! Thank you to all who have made this such a terrific tool and place to be!

My idea? On the trades page in the 'Entry' or 'Name Latin' columns it would be incredibly helpful if the name were hyperlinked to its counterpart at plantsdatabase.com. I've seen lots of plants/seeds listed on trades pages that are not familiar to me; I then find myself with numerous windows open switching back and forth to see what's available.

jcangemi - great suggestion! I have some plants (coleus) that have 10 full pages of PDB hyperlinks.

Trying to set up and add to my journal is driving me absolutely nuts.
When I finally get to the section with the 'add an item' button, it just takes me back to the 'you're looking at your journal' page. I must be doing something really wrong, I can't seem to find the page with the 'fill in the blanks'. I've read the Help and
How To advice and just get completely lost. Wish when you clicked 'Journal' it would just OPEN and have 'add/delete/move' buttons.

The journal code is 2 years old and some of the worst quality code I have on this site. It's a huge application, very complex with a lot of extremely intense code, much of which is broken. It desperately needs a complete rewrite; fixing things here and there is hardly an option anymore.

It's about half-way down my TODO list.

dave

Adding my own notes here...

Can the public journals be listed alphabetically rather than rank ordered according to size? (Not that size of journal isn't a fun bit of information to have, but if I want to see a particular member's journal, it'd be nice to be able to look for it in an alphabetically arranged list ;o)

Good idea; it's done!

dave

Dave, thanks for your answer. I'm just glad it's not all due to my complete ineptitudeness. ;) I'm sure your TODO list is substantial!

Is it possible/feasible (desirable) to allow members to re-set their tradelist (and maybe their journal, too) to the default "blank slate" status?

Obviously this would need to have a serious "are you sure? are you really REALLY sure?" question/disclaimer that would precede the final restore (aka "kill") action...

Resetting those things is easy from the admin menu. Let's leave that to the admins; they should "Contact Us" if they want it cleared.

dave

Dave....thanks for the response... happy to patiently wait our turn...like I said, it's just irritating, and not priority. Janet

DAVE: ACKCKCKCKAK!!!! You changed the Journal listing order without any discussion on the suggestion!!! AND only 5 minutes from the request to the "it's done!" I think I'm gonna cry! Why oh why did I have to be at work today! Please allow me a 2-second post-change argument for my position.

First argument......You can ALWAYS look up a specific persons journal by going to their member page.

Second argument.....I look at the public Journal list quite often as the ones with the most entries generally are users that are actively working in their journals (well except maybe Dave's) and therefore good resources for newbies setting up their own journal. I learned the most about the journal feature by looking at a dozen or so of the largest journals.

If you don't want to switch it back to the old order sequence can we at least have an option to view it by largest to smallest? Pretty, pretty please with sugar on top???



Moby: I wrote some FAQs that it looks like Terry posted in the last day or two under the Journal tab. I'm still working on cleaning them up and expanding them, but at least I think it will give you a good point to start from. If not, email me and I'll give you all the help in the world you need. I seriously (I say it about 50 times in the FAQs) but looking at other people's journals is invaluable when setting up your own.


Terry: sending you an email with some comments/suggestions on the posted Journal FAQs.

OK, I'm going to have to agree with langbr on this one. Here's another monkey wrench to add to the pile. I would LOVE to be able to have the choice of searching by Alphabet or size of tradelist or last updated on ......... If there was a "last updated on ....." feature, most likely the largest tradelists would be close to the top anyway......plus, you would have the benefit of getting the latest updated tradelists.

As we get more and more members adding to the Tradelists, scrolling through them alphabetically will be (is) a nightmare. (Sorry Terry) We currently have over 1000 tradelists to search through.

In the meantime, langbr, you might save your favorites as you find them in your favorites folder. That will probably need to be the way to do it until Dave finds the time to rewrite everything.

This message was edited Aug 14, 2004 12:10 AM

Dave....a couple of glitches I noticed when looking through journals to see what others are doing....just what you wanted to hear... :p))

1. On about half of the members I clicked on to view, it kicked me back to the Page 1 of the 'sort of' alphabetically listed members. (First one that did that was 'BittysGarden'...so tried about 10 more and only reached about half of their journal home pages...the rest bumped me back to page 1 of listings.)

2. There seems to be two alphabetical lists: Pages 1-10 list from '123marie' to 'Zuni'. Pages 10-26 start over again with 'a_leon51' and ends w/ '333333'.

Janet

Okay, a couple ideas - and Dave, please (PLEASE) don't feel the need to implement these immediately - otherwise, we can (and will!) keep you hopping with changes from now til doomsday!

For Journals AND Tradelists, would it be practical or advisable to set them up somewhat like the Member List: http://davesgarden.com/memberlist/

1) Wen you click on "View other journals" or "View other members' trade lists" you would be taken to a page where you could browse by first letter of the username (with the links "All - A - B - C - D - E - F - G.....)

2) Once you opened up any letter (or the "All") you could then re-sort it by # of items.

I still have some other suggestions on searches (especially within the tradelists), which I'll post on a separate thread so we can keep the ideas flowing. Once we seem to have exhausted everyone's "wish lists" then I'll combine them and submit them to Dave for him to consider. Fair enough, everyone?

Sounds great, Terry! I know Dave is busy. I personally don't see how he gets so much done.

jcangemi - I believe that when you click on a Journal and it takes you back to the listing page that means that they user has not made their Journal public (it's a private journal). As for the sorting alphabetically......the system treats capital letters differently than lower-case letters and so all the numeric and capital letters are first and then it goes through the lowercase user names after the capitals.

Dave,

You write "The journal code is 2 years old and some of the worst quality code... a lot of extremely intense code".

May I ask, what language you're working with? Are you open to other code writers helping?

Happy to help if I can....

Donna

I use PHP for the programming language, with Linux, Apache and MySQL powering the boat.

Not really open for other programmers just yet. I'm still able to handle it decently well, and adding another programmer to the mix would mean I'd lose a month training that person on my system. There are at least 20,000 lines of code that make up DG (I haven't counted lately)

thank you for the offer, though!

dave

langbr...got it on the alphabetical issue. . . however on issue #1, if what you say is true, then the sentence at the top needs to be changed which reads: "Below is the list of all Dave's Garden members who are keeping online journals here and have elected to allow other members to view them." Thnx. Janet

When going a journal other than my own the page says, "Welcoem to....".

Fixed :)

dave

I think it would be ever so nice if there were a place where we could talk about, ask about or check old posting on one specific type of plant. Such as one place to find out about Joseph's Coat with subcategory for 'Illumination' or Cosmos with a subcategory of Dwarf Ladybird or Oaks with a subcategory of Burr, Shin, Live, etc. I know there are posting on Plants Database, but it isn't a true open forum.

I would love to have a place where I could post pictures or look for pictures of seeds of particular plant types - not varieties specifically. I posted seed pictures for a buddelia, but unless you know which variety to look under you wouldn't necessarily know it was there. ( I recently had someone ask me how to harvest seeds from Gloriosa Daisies.) Personally, I would love to know how to find/ what to look for in collecting seeds from a cuphea, a Cigar Plant specifically.

Or a place to find out about whether a seed needs light or dark to germinate. Or maybe a pre-chill or extra warmth. Or the name of a seed company where they're avaiable to buy if none are avaiable for trade.

Please, instead of having to do searches and wading through off-subject posts could we have a forum like that?

But know that whatever you decide - you have my thanks for ALL you do for us with these sites!!!!

This message was edited Aug 16, 2004 2:11 PM

I have a TradeTracker suggestion to add! What about a "copy this trader" function. I am doing my second trade with a certain person and it would be nice if all of the information on the trader (name, address, etc) could be copied so that I could just enter the new things being traded instead of having to copy and paste 5 lines. Thanks!

Another suggestion for the Tradelist:

I feel pretty sure that it is common for people to have a completely outdated tradelist, and I don’t look at the tradelists much because you never know if the last update of someone’s tradelist was years ago. So I was thinking, could you put a button on your tradelist that says something like “mark as updated” that you can hit every once in awhile to show that you’re keeping up with your tradelist? That way when you look at anyone’s tradelist it says how long it’s been since they hit that button to confirm that it is up-to-date.

-Paul-

Paul, I am one of the guilty ones that doesn't keep her trade list updated. Either the button you suggest, or even a date of last update would help others looking at my list.

Is there some way to make it easier to go from the new private email, to the trade tracker? From regular email, you can toggle to trade tracker easily, but now you have to open multiple windows of DG, which my puter doesn't like to do. (Lousy connection)

Terre_ are you copying and pasting? If so then can't you use the same window and just use the DG tabs?

Beats me, Brenda, can I? I'll have to try. My computer may not be the only thing that is challenged!

Edited to add, not easily. I tried, and best I can figure out, it is multiple steps to cut and paste each line, Name, street addy, city etc. Or am I doing it wrong? If I am looking at private email, and want to add something from there to trade tracker:

Step 1 Click on trading tab
Step 2. Click on "Use the trade tracker"
Step 3: "Add a new trade"
Step 4: I add their name, but then have to go back to the mail page to get more info.
Step 5 Click on member page tab
Step 6 View private email
Step 7 FIND the right email and open it.

Then go back to the trade tracker! No, this doens't work for me. What am I doing wrong?
Could there be a link to one step between the two pages?

This message was edited Sep 19, 2004 11:08 AM

Having two windows open does make it easier to transfer data from one place to another...(this is from a person who currently has 5 browser windows, three spreadsheets and three emails all open or minimized at the bottom of my page ;o)

Waaaaa! I want your computer! Actually, I want your internet connection. Mine won't support multiple windows well. I'll just have to do all of my DG stuff at work. My boss won't mind...

Terry...you use your computer the same way I do! LOL and when it drops me completely OUT of IE, I have to wonder "what the heck did *I* do?" :-D (As if I didn't already KNOW what I'd done...let's see..5 windows of IE, a PSP, 2 instances of "My computer", the inbox, and several open emails. YEP! That *must* be the cause!)

~julie~

Well I couldn't pass up this comment (sorry for hi-jacking!).

Despite everyones groans and ugh's over Bill Gates and Windoze, I have to admit that the concept of "windows" (aka viewing panes) on the computer has got to be one of the great ideas of the 20th century! (ok well maybe in the top 1000 great ideas....electricity, cars, planes, etc -- those are pretty important too!)

How about a place on the Trade Tracker Main Page for general comments? It would be nice to be able to make Trade Notes to myself so when I get to work in the morning I can log into Trade List and see what I need to do to get caught up. (Like e-mail Tomato Trade List to Bill; send image of ____ to COTYKE, etc.) It would also be nice for when you do something stupid, like forget who you're expecting something from, to be able to note it on the TT since you can't log a Trade without putting a name in.

Thanks for asking ~:-)

Well, not to hijack the thread, but I don't think Gates really invented windows - he definitely didn't invent the concept: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa081898.htm and http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~swhite/history/ (scroll down to the section titled "History of windowing systems" - not that Gates hasn't done an excellent job of exploiting and marketing the technology, let's give credit where it's due, since Macintosh and Apple both had GUI interfaces before MS Windows was introduced.

WoW, Terry! I didn't know ANY Windows User would give credit to Apple & Macintosh!! Thanks!

Ah yes, but wasn't Gates and Allen working together back at MIT in the '70s? Allen went his way and Gates his. All this while Wozniak and Jobs were doing there thing at Apple....

http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~swhite/history/timeline-ORG.html#121

Some of us use Windows by choice; others of us use it because we're not ready to switch our networked system of four computers to a different platform ;o)

DH was using a Mac wayyyy back in the early 80s at his first accounting job. Unfortunately, MS dominated the scene from then on out and we've opted to stick with PCs for compatability reasons more than anything else. Doesn't mean we're big Gates fans...

langbr, yeah - but it looks like the idea of multi-tasking environment (aka "windows") was more than a gleam in somebody's eye long before Gates hit the computer scene.