Building a Better Ooooby.

[Pete Russell]

Let us know what works and what doesn't work for you on the Ooooby site. We are planning upgrades so your feedback is invaluable.

Please leave your comments below. Positive and negative.

[Liz Cooper]

Hi, I've just joined Ooooby. What I would love to get out of it at this stage is to find opportunities for Wwoofing over the next 6 to 7 weeks. Is there a Wwoofing section that I've missed? It would be great, and it could help propogate Ooooby around the planet and country too. I would love to work in somebody's garden, and learn about permaculture, and about Ooooby, sustainability, self reliance- from someone elses perspective. Receive a little mentoring into the culture that surrounds Ooooby. Be Immersed in the daily life of it, even though I am passing through and don't have my own garden currently. Is the swap section only for swapping food, or can people list tuition, accomodation, labour or even non gardening related goods and services there too? Looking forward to getting involved somehow.

[Will]

Hi Liz,

that's a really good idea. For now you can just stick in a comment in the Sharing group for Waiheke and anyone on that local feed will pick up your message. We do want to do something a bit TradeMe like where you can pop in wanted/offer under many difference categories for your local area. Ooooby ultimately is anything from our back yards.



Liz Cooper said:

Hi, I've just joined Ooooby. What I would love to get out of it at this stage is to find opportunities for Wwoofing over the next 6 to 7 weeks. Is there a Wwoofing section that I've missed? It would be great, and it could help propogate Ooooby around the planet and country too. I would love to work in somebody's garden, and learn about permaculture, and about Ooooby, sustainability, self reliance- from someone elses perspective. Receive a little mentoring into the culture that surrounds Ooooby. Be Immersed in the daily life of it, even though I am passing through and don't have my own garden currently. Is the swap section only for swapping food, or can people list tuition, accomodation, labour or even non gardening related goods and services there too? Looking forward to getting involved somehow.

[Megan]

Glen Kirkby said:

Also, it would be cool to be able to view a basic geographic display or listing of the members, so that one might gauge local involvement. I understand that this is all fairly new so it may not be that helpfull yet, but I think it would be awesome once it gets up and running. Glen.

Great suggestion Glen, I would certainly find the geographic display/listing of members really useful. Hopefully it's not going to be too difficult to implement.

[Liz Cooper]

Hi. I'm so chuffed you adopted my suggestion about the Woofing link. a further suggestion:

I would like to be able to send a message to all these people..... on my email program I can check boxes next to all the people and then perform the same task; could something be added to this effect, so that a message could be addressed to all the people who appear as a result of search criteria? if this is already possible by some means, could someone let me know how?

thanks

liz

[Pete Russell]

From what I understand, you can only select multi select friends when doing a broadcast style email. Inconvenient I know. We will be working on a custom site which will be completely built by us so that we can do anything we want. For now we are restricted by what the ning platform will allow us. Thanks for your suggestions. Keep them coming.

Liz Cooper said:

Hi. I'm so chuffed you adopted my suggestion about the Woofing link. a further suggestion:

I would like to be able to send a message to all these people..... on my email program I can check boxes next to all the people and then perform the same task; could something be added to this effect, so that a message could be addressed to all the people who appear as a result of search criteria? if this is already possible by some means, could someone let me know how?

thanks

liz

[Laura]

When you enter a discussion you can see at top the title, who posted and when.
It would be very valuable to see where the poster lives: Auckland, Sydney, UK (= seasons other way round) etc.
Currently I go back to the profile before answering "what to plant now" for example - Auckland will be diffrent to Palmerston North, or Christchurch - let alone London or Melbourne...
If the posters area could be displayed in the top - that would be very helpful to answer questions.

[Christy Ralphs]

Hi Pete & James

Nice to stumble across the NZ gardener article today :)

A couple of small comments re site - just my opinion, and what would suit me :). I would like to see the groups which are actively being used featured on the front page more, e.g. recipes, and the questions and answers etc. For me (apart from the sharing) this is what i enjoy most about using the site. Would be good to see what new discussions were being started in these groups for example (the less clicking i have to do to just 'check' something the more likely i am to do it). For me personally the big blog posts that take up most of the space could be a lot smaller - some are interesting but I'm most interested in more local articles and fellow ooooby members comments and blogs. Under 'recent blog posts' it would be good to see who posted, and the first couple of sentences from that post. I also liked it better when the photos were bigger and changing.

But maybe only my personal preferences :)

Cheers, Christy

[Christy Ralphs]

you are very fast!

Christy Ralphs said:

Hi Pete & James

Nice to stumble across the NZ gardener article today :)

A couple of small comments re site - just my opinion, and what would suit me :). I would like to see the groups which are actively being used featured on the front page more, e.g. recipes, and the questions and answers etc. For me (apart from the sharing) this is what i enjoy most about using the site. Would be good to see what new discussions were being started in these groups for example (the less clicking i have to do to just 'check' something the more likely i am to do it). For me personally the big blog posts that take up most of the space could be a lot smaller - some are interesting but I'm most interested in more local articles and fellow ooooby members comments and blogs. Under 'recent blog posts' it would be good to see who posted, and the first couple of sentences from that post. I also liked it better when the photos were bigger and changing.

But maybe only my personal preferences :)

Cheers, Christy

[Jay Robinson]

Hi, Pete,

Just having fun digging around here in ooooby - sweet!

One suggestion I would have, though is if people could be encouraged somehow to start discussions rather than load up the blogs, that would be great. This would let a person look at what topic areas are being discussed, in an organized way at a glance. It also means that the blogosphere would not bring down poor laptops with limited memories. There were 205 posts at the blogspace here and it took several minutes and a memory upgrade just to see what was in there. A list of discussions is not a memory hog.

Otherwise I think this is a great space to work and play. Thanks for getting her going. Thanks too for that "agrarian" article posted at blog, it is especially relevant.

cheers,
Jay

[Pete Russell]

Thank you Robbie. I have made the change as you have suggested. I had run a couple of promos in the UK and US so was mainly due to that. But your point is valid so I have amended it.

Robbie Deighton said:

It looks like I'm the first member from Belgium. The title 'From the UK or USA' nearly discouraged me from joining as it kind of implies the site is only for people from New Zealand, the UK or USA. It may be a good idea to change this to 'not from New Zealand?' or even leaving it out altogether and putting the history in a generic 'about' page

[Pete Russell]

Thanks for the feedback. How specifically do you mean?

Robbie Deighton said:

Nice new ooooby banner :) I'd like to point out though that it doesn't play nice with some of the themes :(

[Pete Russell]

Aha. I get it now. Hmmm. Lets see what others come back with.

Robbie Deighton said:

here's an example from one of the featured members: http://ooooby.ning.com/profile/Keb