another use for blogging software

Last fall I began a list­ing of plants that were new to the gar­den. I used it to track things like a plant’s com­mon and sci­en­tific names, what size of plant I put in the ground, where I planted it, when I planted it, along with mis­cel­la­neous notes. At first I used Microsoft Excel to main­tain my spread­sheet of plants, and it worked great in a lot of ways.

The main prob­lem devel­oped because I divide my time at home between two dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, one in the main house, and the other back in my stu­dio. Because I share the machine in the front house with John, he’d often be on it when I wanted to make an entry for a new plant. I had sep­a­rate copies of my plant list on the front machine and the one in my stu­dio, and soon the two lists started to wan­der out of sync. Had I remem­bered to mail myself a copy of the updated file to update my other com­puter? Or had I remem­bered to enter the newest addi­tion to both spread­sheets? Things got messy fast.

One improve­ment would have been to share a file between my two machines on the home net­work. But because I don’t have the most reli­able wire­less avail­able I’m not always logged into the net­work on both machines. So shar­ing a file wouldn’t work all the time.

Then it occurred to me: Why not use the capa­bil­i­ties of this blog to main­tain my plant list? I use Word­Press soft­ware on my site to power this blog. A lot of peo­ple are using Word­Press soft­ware (not to be con­fused with blogs mounted at WordPress.com) to run their web­sites instead of using it to power a blog, and using the capa­bil­i­ties of the blog to main­tain a list seemed no more weird. The net result is that now I can log into my blog from any­where on earth and update my plant list.

At first I kept the list pri­vate, but now any­one can click the “plant list” tab below my header and take peek at my gar­den. Soon (and when I have some time) I’ll add images to the list­ing, and I’ll also have the abil­ity to link eas­ily to any post­ing that I might make about a plant. And at some point I’ll be adding the older gar­den plants to the list.

What have I given up with this arrange­ment? One thing I really liked about the old Excel spread­sheet was that I could sort infor­ma­tion in columns eas­ily, by sci­en­tific name, by loca­tion, by date planted–whatever I wanted to look at.

Word­Press allows you to cus­tomize the basic out-of-the-box pro­gram with a long and grow­ing menu of plu­g­ins. But there isn’t any plu­gin I’ve found yet that allows you to sort data in columns or rows sim­ply by click­ing on the header. (There used to be a plu­gin that did just that, but it wasn’t com­pat­i­ble with newer ver­sions of Word­Press.) If any­one knows of a plu­gin that does this, please let me know–It’d make my record-keeping a lot easier!

Of course, anyone’s wel­come to write me notes about the list. Are there plants you want to know more about? Or are there plants you want warn me about before they take over the gar­den? Or you could do a quick psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis of me by look­ing at what I choose to put in the ground. Like, what kind of per­son would plant a camel­lia and Cal­i­for­nia native plants? Is he a men­ace to society?

September 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • | No Comments »