Seedling Blog

Seedling was a garden tracking web app that I developed and first released around 2011. It gained a few organic users but I eventually let the project languish. The project lived at http://seedlinglog.com. The blog lived at http://blog.seedlinglog.com

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Midnight Cheese Blog post:

Seedling: A Garden Tracking App

I've been working on a new project that has really been a lot of fun since it's inception about a year ago. The project is called Seedling and it's a new web app that will let people track the progress of their backyard gardens.

The app lets you log basic milestones like plant yield, height, photos, etc. With that data, the app  automatically creates graphs so you can visualize the progress and performance of your fruit and vegetables (or any other type of plant.)

There will also be a social aspect to Seedling. In addition to posting and sharing photos, people can comment on milestones and follow other users.

We're aiming for a soft launch/preview in time for folks to start tracking some of their fall gardens.

To sign-up for the first launch or to receive more info as we progress, you can get on our email list at http://seedlinglog.com/ We'll also be posting more info on our blog in the coming weeks. http://blog.seedlinglog.com/

Post every 6-8 days.

Post Topics:

Introduction

The idea behind Seedling first came about during an oil change in the garage. We keep a log in the form of a spreadsheet of all work that is done to our cars. It includes dates and mileage among other notations. That got us thinking about applying something similar to our vegetable gardens. It would be a great way to note the progress of the plants and learn from successes and failures year over year.

We started searching around for web based garden logs or journals and surprisingly, there wasn't much out there. A few people had posted printable journal pages that could be manually compiled into physical notebooks. There were one or two related web apps that came up but they were either grossly underdeveloped or unbelievably disjointed and complicated.

So we set out to create an app that was functional, yet elegantly simple. Here are some of our features:

Features

Logs & Milestones

Seedling allows you to log the progress of your plants by recording milestones such as height, yield counts, fertilizer applications and more. Eventually you'll be able create your own custom milestone types.

Photos

Photos are a big part of Seedling. We encourage you to upload lots of photos of your plants as they grow. What better way to record their activity?

Graphs & Analytics

Graphs are a powerful way to track your plants' growth, not only during the season, but year after year. As you enter data day after day, the app will create these for you.

Social

Everyone's plants are available for others to see, follow along with, and comment on. Learn and share with locals or people around the world.

Seedling has been a lot of fun to build. We hope you'll find it useful. Also, we love feedback, so feel free to drop us a line at any time: feedback@seedling.com

In the coming weeks we'll be posting more in-depth descriptions of the features listed above. Bookmark us and visit again soon.

P.S. If you'd like early access to our coming preview release, sign-up for our mailing list at http://seedlinglog.com/

Log

We've designed the Seedling log interface in a way that should be familiar to people that take part in social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The log is made up of individual entries that are customizable by the user. Log entries are displayed in a list format with the newest entries at the top of the page. We thought about a spreadsheet-like interface among others, but to be honest, we didn't want to start looking like a suite of office software.

The entry process is going to remain pretty simple. We'll provide a few default entry types like Yield, Water, and Fertilizer. Ultimately we want the user to define the entry, so we'll be giving you the ability to create your own entry types. Once you create an entry type, it will be available in your dropdown list for future use across all your plant logs.

Photos will also be added just like any other entry type. (More on photos, soon.)

In addition to photos, each entry will have an option for notes. So if you add a fertilizer entry you can note the brand and amount that was applied.

Other users will be able to comment on each of your entries.

We expect to be sending out preview invite emails shortly. If you haven't already, sign up for an early preview of the site over at seedlinglog.com.

Graphs

Seedling as an application collects a lot of data. With graphs we want to present that data in a useful way. For example, by graphing yield counts users can compare how their plants are faring against similar plants in the same region or other parts of the world.

Graphing height and other metrics can work in a similar fashion. Graphs will also allow users to compare plant performance year over year.

Gardening is a giant science experiment. The more data we can record, the more we know for next year and beyond.

Photos

What better way to record and share your plant's progress than with a quick photo? Photos are added to seedling just like any other log entry. Select photo type, choose your image and Seedling does the rest.

We think photos will be pretty important to  our users so we've given them their own tab. The photo tab will display all photos associated with a single log. This way you're not scrolling through your entire log to find one photo.

As with other entries, photos will accept comments from other users.

Following Users and Plants

Fees