Hi all,
I came here at the recommendation of a gardening friend who knew about this growing community. I'll have to look around more and find out how everything works, but I like what I see :-). I've run a personal gardening website (robsplants.com) for a long time now, and some years ago started a "PlantLinks" section that's intended to provide organized links about specific plants, to sites of interest/value to gardeners. The links mostly go to sizeable resource sites, mostly non-commercial but also some nurseries that have good information. In recent times, I started seeing links to AllThingsPlants pop up in Google results, but the information was usually a bit sparse. It looks like that's improving a lot! So I'd be interested in putting links from PlantLinks to well developed ATP pages. For most sites, I just build a screen-scraping harvester, but since this is a kindred community, I thought maybe a direct partnership was an easier way to go about things. Take a look at http://www.robsplants.com/plan... and see if you think links to this site would be a good addition to the ones already listed.
By the way - if you're into seed trading, I just started a new attempt at getting a seed trading site with some enhanced features off the ground. I'm trying to interest some more users in signing up, so swing on by and judge for yourself if it might work for you.

plantrob!

plantrob. I'll check it out.

Hi Plantrob, and welcome!

I think that Dave, who built, maintains and administers this site usually reads all posts in this forum, so he'll see it. My guess is that you would be linking mostly to "Parent Plant Pages" in the Plant Database, or specific articles.

Would you want to display links pointing to specific ATP discussion forums, like Daylilies or Orchids? If I had an esoteric question and didn't know which Goggle hits to trust, I would go to one of those forums, search briefly, and then post a question.

I like your idea of collecting "good" links.

I used to be more of a seed trader, but a few years in the Hog Wild Piggy Swap has left me with more seeds than I have room or time to plant. Have you seen the HWPS? It's as much an annual party and year-long chat thread as a seed-swap. Cubits, Ella's Garden, Cottage Gardening forum for the Chat thread:
http://cubits.org/ellasgarden/...

Last year's Have and Ask Lists are here:
http://cubits.org/ellasgarden/...

It's a many-to-many swap where people list their currently available seeds, and then others ask for specific packets. When that is over, and dozens of people have asked for 100 or more seed varieties each, we bundle up and send the requested seeds to Ella. She re-packages them and sens them back to us. That really minimizes postage!

But it is a once-per-year event.

Hi plantrob and ! I am a fairly new member here too, having moved from the DG site. I go way back to February 4 and started participating before i really knew how. I only have time to participate in one garden site so i want a really good one. ATP may not be the biggest, but it is growing quickly. There is so much positive, forward moving energy here and such a variety of things going on. I suggest you take a look at a few of the forums and start participating in an area of interest to you, maybe share some of your photos, get to know some of the members...most of all enjoy. It is definitely a member friendly and friendly member site with a lot to offer.

Hi Rob and to ATP.
I have been to your site many times. @dave should be along soon.

Looks good. By all means, link away.

As for seed trading, also check out some of the trading forums here at ATP. We have a very active community. I'd hesitate to send them to a different site for doing trades though since we're kinda wanting to keep our members active here at ATP.

Hi Dave,
My question about a partnership of sorts came from the observation that
a) there are an absolutely huge number of plant species represented in the database here
b) many of the more obscure species pages are empty at the moment
I would be very interested in linking to the content-rich pages, while I'd wait linking to the less populated ones until they develop more content. I've developed some custom criteria to do that with Dave's Garden pages, but it's somewhat painful, which is why I don't have nearly all the DG pages represented in my database. Is there a way to get a list of pages with developed content (e.g., at least one photo, some other content fields filled in)? That way, I could periodically refresh the links from PlantLinks to ATP.

As for seed trading - we all have our passions and niches. I have no desire to set up an original-content community site or forums - sites like this do that much better. But I don't know of any site that does what PlantLinks does: collect and present good links from around the web, since no one site will ever have the best information about all plants. Similarly, I have a passion around a certain type of seed trading, and have set up my new trading capabilities to see how that would work out. Not to take traders away from other sites, but to see if mine can complement them. We'll see how that works out.

This site seems like the kinds of places I've enjoyed on the web since I first started gardening and finding compatriots on the web nearly 20 years ago now. Most of them are gone now, and others aren't what they used to be, so I'm glad to see such a vibrant community here.

plantrob said:Is there a way to get a list of pages with developed content (e.g., at least one photo, some other content fields filled in)? That way, I could periodically refresh the links from PlantLinks to ATP.

I can do that. Is there a sort of format you'd want?

Format doesn't matter too much. I'll have to write a script to import it anyway. For simplicity, a tab-delimited text file might work best, with as tab-separated fields:

botanical name
page URL (only the bit after plants/view/, really)
number of photos

That's enough to include links from PlantLinks. I might ask for a fresh list every six months or so.

Here ya go Rob, try this out. I bet it'll have what you need:

http://whitinger.net/robsplant... (1.6MB)