My local newspaper, the Edinburgh Evening News recently asked if they could run a short piece on the forage.rs website. And here it is – the Evening News staff spent some time picking out plant sightings they though might be of interest to their Edinburgh readers. If you’ve seen the article we hope you like it, and we’d be happy to hear your feedback.
Just a quick note to keep you up to date with what is happening with the project. The forage.rs project has recently undergone some redevelopment behind the scences and we will be relaunching the site shortly using our new codebase. At the moment I am waiting for our iPhone app to be updated so we can make the switch.
The move to the new codebase should make it easier for us to add new features to the site, and fix a few problems the old code had. Most importantly the new site will handle photos much better, so it will be easier to add a photo of any plants you have found.
We’ve had a few people ask if they can use the forage.rs map on their website, and the answer is now yes! We’ve developed an embeddable version of the map that you can use on your own website to display things on the map.
unfortunately wordpress.com doesn't allow us to use iframes in our posts, so the image above is just a static example of what the embedded map will look like.
This is initially a quick fix – there are some features that don’t work quite so well in a smaller window, and we will be working to fix that in the future. At present the embeddable map is read only – if you’d like the visitors to your site to add sightings to the map, then you’ll need to send them over to our website. If you have any comments on this new feature we’d be happy to hear them.
To get the HTML code to embed the map in your page, just navigate to the map-view that you want, and click on the permalink button. The HTML code you need is contained in the second textbox.
In order to reflect some of the work that has been going on behind the scenes recently the website has been given a quick refresh.
We’ve changed the layout a little, made use of our new logo, and updated our FAQ and disclaimer. We hope you like the new layout – let us know if anything needs fixing!
Following many months of development, forage.rs is now available on your iPhone. The Forager’s Friend is available as a free download from the apple app store.
This first release allows you to access and add markers to the map while you are out foraging. We plan to add lots more features as the website develops. We’d be happy to hear your ideas for new features, or any other comments you may have on the app.
I came across this fascinating picture recently while looking for more information about modern day foraging. The map is taken from Robert Kelly’s book The Foraging Spectrum, and it shows the distribution of modern day forager societies. It’s quite incredible to see that even today there are people in the world who forage as part of their daily lives.
My next topic of interest is how foraging relates to our lives here in the West.
We’re always keen to hear more feedback on the website, so to make it easier we’ve set up a web forum where you can post your comments on the website.
We’re open to your hearing bug reports, feature requests, and joys and frustrations of using the website. You can find the forum here
One feature we’ve been wanting to add for a while is the ability to add photo markers. So we’ve been working on it for quite some time, and the end result is that you can link a photo of the plant to any sighting you choose to add to the database.
But better than that, the website will extract location and date information from the EXIF tags if they exist and position the marker accordingly. This is helpful because most modern camera phones can stamp GPS co-ordinates on each photo you take – Apple’s iPhone, and Nokia phones can do this just by changing a few settings.
So for the last couple of months we’ve been recording new plant sightings by just taking a picture of the plant using a Nokia N95 camera phone. So far we’ve found that the GPS co-ordinates are actually very accurate, and recording sightings this way is very quick. We look forward to the day when you can add photo markers to the map just using a standalone app on your iPhone while your are out there ‘in the field’….. but that might require a little bit of work yet……. 
We’ve also received a few requests for permalinks – links that would allow you to share the particular view you have in front of you on the map. That is now possible using the permalink button – the 4th button in the top left of the screen. Click on it and you’ll be able to copy and paste a link to the map in an IM conversation or email.
I hope this is helpful when sharing specific maps you have found that can’t easily be addressed by URLs such as http://forage.rs/location/country/town
A few people have asked us if it is possible to load a map zoomed in to a particular place rather than start with a world map and manually zoom in each time. Well we’ve done a little bit of work and made it work.
You can now address maps using URLs like http://forage.rs/location/placename. For example:
Or if your city lives in the shadow of a larger city of the same name in a different country
You can also use zip or post codes
You can search for a place with one long string, although this doesn’t look quite as nice
I hope this is useful for people who’d like to use the map more locally. Other requested features are on their way….
