Happy Thanksgiving!
November 27th, 2008 by Tim
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!
Shitty Contextual Advertising
November 3rd, 2008 by Alex
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…
theFreshScent: Halloweed ‘08
October 31st, 2008 by Tim
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
theFreshScent Hits 500 Strong
October 9th, 2008 by Tim
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
Growing Pains
September 15th, 2008 by AlexAs with any site (re)launch, there are going to be a few kinks and bugs to work out. I just want to let everyone know we’re spotting them as fast as we can and working through each one.
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:
+ tFS Team
theFreshScent v3 – Weeee’re Baaaack
September 15th, 2008 by Alex
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.
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.
tFS v3 Survey Results
May 18th, 2008 by AlexAlmost one month ago, we created and posted the tFS v3 Survey with the idea of learning more about what our readers like and applying that knowledge to the next version of theFreshScent.
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.
theFreshScent v3 Survey
April 23rd, 2008 by Alex
I hope you can all tell, but we’re starting to ramp things up here @ tFS. The v3 blog is under active development, and we’re really excited about the new features and technical set-up that’s being put together.
That said, our website is only as strong as the content on it. We want to know what you think about the current version of tFS and what you would like to see in Version 3. Nowhere in our About page does it say that we’re mind readers, so it’s time for you guys to step up and give us the news.
This quick survey, linked below, will go a long way in helping us map out and design posts and content that appeal to YOU. If you think something blows, let us know. If you think something rocked and you want to see more of it, let us know that too.
Take the survey! Take the survey! Take the survey!
So, bottom line, the more people who help us by filling this out, the better our content is going to be. I hope that it’s a good trade-off, 2 minutes of time for some killer articles to read & pictures/videos look at.
As always, if there’s anything missing, hit us up via the Contact page or via email.
Oh yea, fill out the survey!
