What's happening

April 2014
Sadly, Subherbia will be put on the shelf for a while. While a good head of steam was in place, personal issues require full time *paid* employment. I hope to get back to it someday...



January 2014
The client and server side frameworks for the site are nearly complete, including a few rewrites, which means that progress on the apps should accelerate. We will be starting with a recipe box app, which we hope to have in beta in a couple of months.

For those interested in the framework, here are the open source technologies and libraries that we are using to develop the site: Jetty servlet container, MongoDB for database storage, MailGun for email communication, all running on Rackspace cloud servers. The mobile-optimized web front end is coded using HTML5 and Javascript, along with the JQuery, Backbone, and LoDash Javascript libraries and Twitter's Bootstrap UI library.   


October 2013
Technical work over the summer has been focused on building a solid foundation for the app suite, including a REST framework for the subherbia API and an administration site for managing the entire site, plus basic user registration and sign in. There has also been a focus on a responsive web client that will consider mobile first and easily adapt to larger display devices. 

In addition to this technical progress, a lot of time has been spent building skills and experience in the real world, primarily as a UCCE Master Gardener. This work includes working in our demonstration garden (we will soon reach 10,000 pounds of produce donated to a local food bank this year) and providing free weekly classes to the public.

Technical work will ramp up through the winter as the work in the garden slows down. Stay tuned for more frequent updates over the next few months!


July 2013
The first few months have been a whirlwind. We conducted a design contest on www.99designs.com for a company logo, and were very happy with the results. We ended up with over 300 design submissions from 125 designers - far more than we had anticipated. In the end we chose what we think is an elegant, simple design. We hope that you like it too.


On the development side, most of the last few months have been spent trying out a wide range of open source tools and libraries - there is a lot of great new software available compared to the last time I did this ten years ago. By the end of June we had pretty much settled on what we are going to use and have started development in earnest. 


April 2013
Work has begun!

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