theFreshScent Undergoes Re-Structuring
March 16th, 2009 by TimtFS Readers,
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
Lost Content
February 3rd, 2009 by AlextFS was subject to an attack that brought down our hosting service just a short while ago. As it stands, we’ve lost a little under a day’s worth of content, and all of the ensuing comments (including the hilarious Rainbow Cake thread) from this Tuesday.
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
theFreshScent: RSS Changes
January 22nd, 2009 by Alex
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.
tFS: Happy Holidays 2008
December 25th, 2008 by Alex
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
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
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!
