Things have been quiet recently here on the web-site, but there has been a lot of activity going on in the background!
From this spring there will be some some significant changes in the way that the business operates. We are moving onto a strictly part-time basis, to allow scope for other activities. The biggest impact is on the garden … … read more
It has been quite a long time since there was an update to the plant database itself, so here it is – Data Release 22.
There is no program version update to go with it, the production program for Windows remains at version 1.6.1 and the mobile edition at 1.7. The downloadable install files now use Data Release 22, as … … read more
You may have noticed already that some of the web pages have changed in appearance. I’m in the process of updating the site, so at the moment there is a mixture of old and revised pages.
The most noticable difference is moving to a slightly wider page view, which will hopefully make them easier to read. Nearly everyone is now … … read more
As you may have noticed – there has not been much happening here during the last few months! In fact there has been lots of other garden related activity going on, but this has left very little time for Plant Base program development. The current tricky financial conditions mean that priority must be given to short term needs. Though the … … read more
We have recently released our second Android smartphone app – the “Plus” edition of the original PBO Viewer. This adds the advanced search options, with all the selection choices of the “Advanced Search” online database web page.
Apart from the initial search form, the rest of the app is exactly the same as the basic, free, PBO Viewer. There is … … read more
After many, many hours of coding from last autumn throughout the winter, the new Plant Base progam is finally at a stage where it can be used for some serious testing.
Obviously individual sections have been tested during development, but that doesn’t give an overall view. So I have now started to use the new program to manage updates on … … read more
I took a rare day off from coding yesterday, to have a walk around the Hillier Gardens. The weather was a bit dreary but as soon as I entered the gardens my spirits were lifted! Just behind the entrance buildings the winter garden area was looking great – all the classic elements were there, coloured stem dogwoods and willows, white … … read more
Transferring web hosting raised just one really significant issue. That was due to the new hosting server running Apache 2 with mod_security. This appears to have an unfortunate quirk of being unhappy with most European accented letters in the the URLs – causing an HTTP 406 error.
With the increasing number of attacks on websites, having mod_security enabled is a … … read more
We switched to a new web hosting company just before the Christmas break and after a few small transfer problems the website seems to be running nicely. The move was really forced on us because the previous web server had become so slow that main Plant Base installation download was taking up to 5 hours. Thankfully everything is much quicker … … read more