Right now you’re probably saying to yourself: Jesus-fucking-Christ it’s about time they get off their negligent ass and write something, anything! Well, this, everybody, is your heads up.

We didn’t get knocked off, bills are paid, dead I insist we are not. In fact, like the old Obi-Wan Kenobi, we intend only to return stronger and better. And we never left per se, but due to our over-active imaginations leading to some new and interesting ideas, we decided to enter yet another phase of theFreshScent thrusting it forward to version 4.

As with any path of evolution, we’ve decided to take tFS in a slightly new direction. We want your experience at theFreshScent to be fun and entertaining as well as inwardly stimulating. (We all try to dream ‘big’ here.)

We appreciate all the comments you’ve left over the several weeks we’ve been absent and it’s nice to know that you’re still thinking about us. Soon we’ll be back, screening the breeze once again and we hope you remain with us upon our return. Until then…

See you soon gorgeous.

- tFS Staff

All of us here @ theFreshScent want to wish everyone a sick ass 4th of July weekend. We’ll be enjoying the Independence Day weekend ourselves with some tasty microbrews and BBQ and promptly will be back with some fresh posts for Monday.

As always, consume in moderation, and keep away from those pesky sobriety checkpoints. They are a serious, serious drag.

Until then… Cheers!

We dropped a sneak peek of our new tee design late last week, now it’s time for a look at the full frontal (and back-al).

The goal was to play off our California roots, hence the Bear Flag design base. When originating some concepts, we started with the tried-and-true centered design and then replaced the lone star with a lone marijuana leaf. The tee looked good, but the design blends in and doesn’t have any real impact.

Impact is good, we always strive to be bigger and better, so why not make our design bigger and better? It was time to magnify, but where the hell do you put a giant flag print?

After some trial, some error and some light cursing – we settled on a left-side print location. Bear face to the front, bear ass to the back. Everything else worked out pretty smoothly.

As we speak, this limited edition run is coming out of the screen printers. We’ll be picking them up on Friday and handing them out to a lucky few at the THC Expo. Not local? No worries, whatever we keep will be available for purchase on theFreshScent.

Let us know what you think, and expect many more custom designs in the future.

The THC Expo is coming up (June 13-14th @ LA Convention Center) and we’ve decided to prep some fresh tFS gear for the occasion.

While we wait for the printers to do their thing, here’s a tiny sneak peek. Coming soon to a back near you, expect an update late next week.

- tFS Team

Thought I’d set your minds at ease that despite what you’ve heard or guessed, no, theFreshScent isn’t dead. We didn’t get captured by the feds, and the core remains alive and kickin’.

We’re in the process of re-structuring how we execute the tFS vision, which basically means a new take on how we approach the crowded world of Counter-Culture news. This will take some time to get sorted out, but once we’re back up, you can bet things will be going full steam ahead, better than ever.

Don’t be discouraged, you will hear back from us soon once house-keeping is complete. I want to thank everybody for their continued visits and patience. We promise not to disappoint when we’re back live.

Keep it fresh.
Tim

We’re working to figure out the source, cause and remedy. This is a new one, so bear with us.

Thanks.

Update: All in all, we’ve lost 4 total posts and close to 20 comments – almost all on the Rainbow Cake post.

We’re working with our hosting provider to diagnose the problem, but since our backups run nightly, there’s a high chance these posts / comments will be lost for good. Hopefully, that’s not the case, but it isn’t looking great right now. Expect another update once we get a final word from our techs.

Thanks everyone, and we apologize for some asshole (or group of assholes) out there causing this inconvenience.

Final Update: Boom. The great staff over at BulletHost diagnosed the problem, found a fix, and restored all of our posts and your comments.

Turns out it wasn’t any sort of malicious behavior, tFS received a massive amount of traffic from StumbleUpon, which combined with our generally “load heavy” website to cause some serious server stress. This actually corrupted some of our database tables, which have now been manually restored.

Over the upcoming weekend, we’ll work on optimizing tFS so that it’s more lightweight and prepared for any large influxes of traffic that come in the future. In the meantime, if you want a hosting company that cares, we highly recommend BulletHost.

Thanks for the patience everyone, we’ll have some fresh content for you all tomorrow.

+ tFS Team

If you’ve opened your RSS reader today or navigated over to Bloglines, there’s a small chance a broken URL for theFreshScent will appear. That shouldn’t be happening, but we made backend changes that might cause some breakage, now here’s the heads up & a quick explanation.

We’ve been experiencing technical issues with our separate RSS feeds (via FeedBurner), and also had an internal debate about their set-up, so a few minor changes have been made.

First, and this is important, theFreshScent RSS URL has changed.

Please re-add (or edit your existing link) to this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/tfsrss

Second, there is no more partial content feed, only full content. In retrospect, partial anything is a waste of time, and we want as many people on top of our content as possible. Don’t worry about having to clickthrough to the site anymore, read until you’re sick of us.

Third, and this one is minor, we’ve upped the number of posts within the RSS feed from 10 to 15. Bigger isn’t always better, but the 10 latest articles barely covers 2 days of our posts, so we wanted to up that a little bit.

As always, you guys are awesome, sorry for this inconvenience.

The time has come for us to slow down over the holiday season, but first we want to wish all our readers a Happy Holidays and New Year. It’s time to kick back by the fire and get some relax time on the books.

We’ve had an amazing last 1/3rd of 2008 with our site re-launch and want to thank everyone who visits tFS for making it grow into one of the most unique blogs on the internet.

Posting will be intermittent while we work on new content for the upcoming year, so don’t get too feisty.

We’ve got some big plans for 2009, stick around and you’ll see what we mean. Keep it fresh and we’ll see you on the flip side.

+ theFreshScent Team

Hey guys, we’re taking off early for the week to prepare ourselves for some mighty feastings but don’t fret. theFreshScent will be back on Monday Dec. 1, ready to roll with fresh new posts and to spice things up, maybe we’ll chuck in an announcement or two, absolutely free of charge.

Until then, Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Usually, I’m a fan of Google Adsense. It helps us earn a couple of bucks off running tFS and shows ads for things like drug tests or hydroponics equipment.

In this case, I couldn’t disagree more.

Let me be clear, any advertisement you see on theFreshScent in support of Prop 8 – the fucking ridiculous effort to ban gay marriage in California – is absolutely against the opinions of this site.

We preach (and practice) tolerance, not hate. Besides, not teaching kids about gay marriage in school just sets them up to be ill-prepared to deal with the issue when it comes up in a real life situation. Think about it…

You all know what night it is, so tFS is taking the day easy. Besides, we’ve got some kick ass costumes to sport tonight…

Next week, expect our usual content to drop, but also it’s time to welcome tFS reviews back into the fold. We’ve got at least 5 to release, a couple strains and a couple of product reviews.

Have a safe and fun Halloween. Oh yea, be sure to avoid people dressed as sex offenders, you just never know.

+ tFS Team

Man, that happened quickly.

theFreshScent has hit its 500th post. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but we’re glad to still be here and serving up fresh content for all our readers.

Talking about fresh content, theFreshScent reviews department is going to start ramping up production in the near future. We know you all love our strain reviews, so expect those to start coming out within the next 2-3 weeks, along with our product reviews.

So, how have things been going with our official re-launch?

How about a couple stats, since 9/15/08 we’ve:

• Dropped 101 posts (not including this one)
• Served up 96,000+ pageviews
• Been found 1,102 times by people searching for ‘medical marijuana’
• Reviewed 17 MMJ strains
• Tweeted 15 times
• Dropped an average of 5 posts per day

Not too shabby, but it’s only the beginning. As we keep this ball rolling, expect more and more original content and a few other tricks up our sleeves.

Until then, thanks for keeping things on point and reading theFreshScent.

+ tFS Team

There was an issue with post images from tFS v2 not showing up, and that’s been fixed. Still, there are a few gaps here and there, and we can’t spot 100% of them.

If anyone sees something wrong with the site, missing images, broken links, or anything of that nature, do us a favor and get in touch at info [at] thefreshscent [dot] com. Please include the URL and as best a description of the problem as you can.

Thanks all.

Update: Looks like two of ‘The Dailys’ links weren’t working. We’ve fixed them, it was my fault anyway, and here they are for everyone to reference:

• Proctologists never forget.
• Beware of Ninja Cat.

+ tFS Team

Our entire team is both happy and relieved to say the following…

Welcome to theFreshScent v3!

It’s been a long time in the making, some might say too long, but hey… we’re not perfect.

Instead, we’ve taken the time to completely re-design, re-think and re-execute theFreshScent. From the bottom to the top, we’ve got a new editorial team that’s going to deliver the freshest news, reviews, videos and everything else on this green planet of ours.

So what’s changed after all this down time? Let’s go over it…

The Entire Damn Site

As you can tell, we’ve undergone a slight facelift. The site is now fluid, up to 1280 pixels, to accomdate for larger browsers. We’ve switched from a 2-column to a 3-column design and revamped our color scheme.

The goal was to create a site that’s got good readability, but still retains the tFS style. No animated weed .gifs around here, just clean design and plenty of stuff to keep you busy.

The Footer

Our footer now has the most commented articles on tFS, the most recent comments on tFS, and links to our social footprint – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc…

Safe For Work / Not Safe For Work

Take a look below the header, on the right hand side, and you’ll see two small-ish buttons: SFW and NSFW. Short for ‘Safe For Work’ and ‘Not Safe For Work’ – this feature removes all the post images from the main column of the site.

Listen, we know there are plenty of people not cool with the contents of this site, especially bosses, but this is our way of getting you past the PC filter. Switch to ‘SFW’ whenever you need to fly below the radar. This feature remembers your setting from page to page, so don’t worry about it browsing around.

The Dailys

This one’s simple, but still fun. Each and every day we’ll put up a fresh set of links for you to check out; one to an article, one to a picture and one to a video.

We plan on making it a good mix… sometimes funny, sometimes thought-provoking, but always interesting.

tFS Quarterly

This is a new experiment of ours. There is plenty of stuff we just can’t get onto the site – whether it’s more subjective pieces, content with unique styling, behind-the-scenes stories or even special deals.

So, we’ve decided to create a quarterly PDF magazine. This will be an outlet for tFS staff to create articles and other types of content that don’t quite fit into the blog mold.

Want to check out the first issue? Sign up on your right and we’ll send it as soon as it’s finished.

Collapsable 2nd Column

Don’t want to see The Dailys? Already signed up for the tFS Quarterly? All good.

Click the arrow next to the title of each module in the 2nd column and it collapses. This brings the content up that you want to see and removes the items you might be bored of.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going for a trend, choice for our readers.

Special Features

Right now, our main special feature is theFreshForums. Our other new experiment – a lightweight approach to improving the way our readers can interact with each other (and us).

No more being stuck to the comments on this site. Now, you can take conversations over to theFreshForums, or start totally new ones. Who knows. It’s not a revolutionary feature, but it’s part of our natural progression from being a one-trick pony to creating the online community for intelligent smokers everywhere.

There isn’t much over there just yet, but that part falls on your shoulders, so get busy.

Twitter

We like Twitter. It’s 140 characters of goodness. It’s also a way for us to post links, comments or other bite-sized pieces of information that don’t quite make it onto the main site.

Check out our module to the right and you’ll always see our tweet stream. Or, go to our twitter page and add us as a friend. We don’t do any spammy bullshit, so no worries on that front.

The Rest…

A lot of the other changes have happened where you can’t see them… behind the scenes. We’ve got a whole new, and bigger, team of writers and we plan on pumping out much, much more content.

This is still a work in progress for us, but we’re ridiculously excited to finally re-launch the site. It’s been a long journey, and everyone here is looking forward to making this place the freshest site on the internet.

Questions, insights, comments or marriage proposals, let us know what you think and we’ll keep improving this thing.

See you on the green side…

Update: We are aware that some images from previous posts appear to be missing. It will be taken care of soon.

So far, the responses have been great. We’ve gotten some funny ones, some weird ones and some reassuring ones. Turns out we’re doing a thing or two right as it stands, but we can definitely improve in other areas.

Let’s start off with something simple that I doubt will surprise anyone…

Yep, mind blowing right? A nice, round 100% of you think it is Ok to use marijuana for recreational use, with a slight caveat of 13% choosing the ‘It Depends’ option. Exactly zero people chose ‘No’ on this one. A real eye-opener right?

The next mixture of questions was designed to get your opinions on both features and content.

Let’s start with features, we created two major parts of the site – the tFS Headshop Locator and Feed Valley. We called them ‘Feature Elements’ and put them right below categories in the sidebar.

Turns out we either didn’t build them well enough or no one can find them, because the majority of responses were on the negative side. A whopping 14% of people use Feed Valley to grab news from other sites and an equally massive 22% of viewers used the tFS Headshop Locator (when it was still functional and not mangled by our hosting providers).

The amount of ‘Don’t Know What It Is‘ responses (54% for Feed Valley and 38% for tFSHL) really opened our eyes to how important navigation is and making it easy for all of you to spot the larger projects that we work on. You can bet the next featured aspects of tFS aren’t going to be as easy to miss. Count on it.

Next we wanted to get some ideas about our content. Asking which category you read the most was a no-brainer and the responses pretty much followed what our site stats show – you all love looking at Medical Marijuana. The MMJ category posted a 46% total, which is an impressive 20% difference between the next closest choice, News, clocking in at 20% of our responses.

Funnily enough, those responses totally contradicted how you felt about the next question – Marc Emery or Tommy Chong? Marc Emery is heavily involved with the legalization movement and seed cultivation. This would translate into readers being more interested with the deeper aspects of marijuana, both legal and structural. Tommy Chong, well known from his comedy movies, represents the lighter side of pot. Jokes, taking life easy and making fun of a few people or places along the way.

You guys favored Tommy by a pretty sizable margin – 65% to 35% – over Marc Emery. What does this mean to us? We’ll keep the news and strain info coming, but you also want to see some more humor and things to make you laugh. No problem, we can handle that.

There were some questions hard for us to put into graph form, but don’t worry, we’re paying attention to every one equally. The one consistent, major complaint has been over the lack of updates since the site last went down. We know you want to see more from us on the content front, and that won’t be an issue when we re-launch. Until then we have to keep quiet on the details.

So sit tight, know that we’re on top of it, and we look forward to dropping some development news in the coming week.