Tonight, Sunday 20 July 2008, we will be upgrading the site. The site may be unavailable for a half hour, but could be longer if the upgrade runs into trouble and the site must be restored from backup.

We expect the upgrade to start

8:00pm EST

It appears that since we upgraded to a new version of user management package the forgotten password tool may not have been working. After refreshing files on the server it appears to be working fine. I went through a complete password reset and change cycle. So if you were trying to reset your password and it was refusing to recognize your email address, please try again.

Steve Knoblock

We are featuring farms who we think have done a good job with their profile on farmfoody.org A good profile has a good description, a relevant set of tags, is using bulletins to communicate with their customers, are taking advantage of frequently asked questions and have added recipes.

That’s the key to using the site — getting foodys in your area to join and become a friend of your farm. Once a friend is established, you have an open line of communication to customers eager to hear about your products.

Quail Cove Farms

A family owned and operated organic farm and natural foods warehouse located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We grow organic sweet potatoes, organic peanuts, organic butternut squash and organic summer vegetables. Visit their farmfoody.org profile.

Homestead Farm

Located in Poolesville, Maryland, opens in late May when the strawberries are ripe and ready to be picked. We offer both Pick-Your-Own and already picked. The summer season brings thornless blackberries, peaches and a variety of summer vegetables including vine ripened tomatoes and sweet corn picked fresh every day. Visit their farmfoody.org profile.

This will be a brief update of some bugfixes. More on the larger changes later.

We now filter recipe and FAQ text for these word processor characters. You should not see any recipes or FAQ items not save their text.

* Note: Filtering is not applied to the title, so please avoid copying and pasting word processor text into a title.

Also, it was discovered pagination was not active on the recipe and FAQ listings, so they were only displaying the first ten. This is fixed, although the pagination is misbehaving a bit, which we are looking into. Update: fixed.

We were featured in the Virginia Farm Bureau News in the Washington Post and in the upcoming issue of Piedmont Virginian magazine.

It’s been a busy time at farmfoody.org and we have been adding new features and updating the website. Our membership is growing. We thank all of the people who have joined our site in recent months. I hope to have an update soon here on the blog.

We had some technical issues yesterday, but things should be settled down for now.

Our contact form was down for a few minutes this afternoon, so if you submitted a message about 12:30pm Eastern, you might want to send it again if you haven’t heard from us.
On the 18th, we had a large spike in traffic causing our database server to be unable to keep up. We discovered some issues with the code and made some change. Also, we took some measures to reduce load on the servers that caused some other problems for reasons we are still exploring.

For reasons too long to go into here, our IP address changed last night. It seemed to propagate quickly, so by morning most people should be seeing our site. If you were logged in prior to the change, your session should have expired by now, so you should not have any problems, but if you do, you may want to clear your cookies and cache if you have problems access the site or logging in. I am still seeing some odd behavior with the login. It is working, but the messages may seem strange. Just click My Account and it should force a login.

We apologize for any disruption.

Steve Knoblock

We are steadily making changes to the site, as you may have noticed. One important change is we have decided, after some thought about the idea of bringing together ‘producers’ and ‘consumers,’ to return to just two account types, Farm (producer) and Foody (consumer), as we had originally envisioned.

If you had a ‘chef’ or ‘gardener’ account with us, you are not forgotten. We will be thinking in the coming months how to incorporate your unique requirements into our site. We recognize the contributions of chefs and gardeners to the farm food community. For now, chefs and gardeners can mark their accounts as special using tags. A chef can enter ‘chef’ as a tag and gardeners can enter ‘gardener’ as a tag. Although, your account type will appear in the listing as Foody, people can find you by searching for the tag.

There will be some fields associated with a chef or gardener account that will become inaccessible. We hope this is a minor inconvience, since the function of these fields can be taken up in a broader context by tags. Tags allow any of our users to match up based on their interests or products without the need for special “interests” fields. Just enter your interests or produce into the tags field. Look for improvements in tagging to come.

Please accept our apology for any inconvenience this change has caused.

We also have rolled out a tweaked version of our site design, which we hope conveys a stronger visual message of farm foods.

Here is a quick summary of changes.

—Steve Knoblock

We will be upgrading the site between Friday 2 May 2008 and Monday 5 May 2008. Expect periods of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance when the site will be down. Our domain may be unavailable at times. Generally, these periods will be late at night or on Sunday evening.

We thank you for your patience as our site grows.

SEK