pcplantdb

[John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

> Wow, I'm surprised and a little hurt by this evaluation of the current
> version (0.3.1) of PIW on <http://dev.permaculture.info/>.  While your
> evaluation is highly accurate of the current live version I think very
> significant progress has been made on dev.

Some time back you said you were going to go ahead and move dev to live 
so I assumed it already was.  However I see now it's not.
This is one of the problems with such an unorganized 'project'.

Meanwhile if I enter

shade loving legume

in the search box the first item returned is a bamboo (which although it 
apparently is OK in partial shade does not appear to be "shade loving" 
in any major way...).
Nothing on the first page is a legume.

If I enter

legume shade loving

nothing on the first page is a legume.

If I simply enter

legume

nothing on the first page is a leguminosae

Meanwhile if I enter

shade loving legume

in google I get about five immediately relevant hits on the first page, 
actually links to pages with information about some specific 
shade-loving legume plant or plants.  One or two even have a hint of 
companion plant/guild allusions in the info provided.

Nothing personal Chad.  It's just that with my hard-ass testing hat on, 
the above tells me that all else being equal I'm going to use google to 
find plant information.

> ....That said I think that much of the framework for gathering
> this data is in place, and as it is today PIW is EXTREMELY useful for
> figuring out what plants might work well with others,

How? Please give some examples.

Maybe the best thing to do is to announce it widely and open it up to 
all comers to play with.
That would get some quantity of real-world feedback as to its usefulness.

With me saying it's pretty useless and Chad saying it's EXTREMELY 
useful, I'd say we need a lot more feedback.
So I reverse my previous postion that it shouldn't be public yet.
Put it out there and let's see what happens.

hi ho,
John S.

--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net