Conferences & Website Changes

Over the past month or so, I’ve added more than usual new features to the locallygrown website, and wanted to let you know about them. I’ll do that at the end of this email, because first I wanted to talk about conferences.

Several weeks ago, I floated the idea with you of holding a mini-conference in Athens, Georgia for market managers of locallygrown.net markets, immediately prior to the Georgia Organics annual conference also being held here. You all gave a generally positive response, so let’s go ahead and do that. Here’s the details:

It’ll be held on Thursday, February 18th, in downtown Athens. It will consist of presentations from me (and anyone else who wants to show off what they’ve done) and round table discussions about the system, best practices, and so forth, from roughly 9am to 2pm. We’ll then re-convene a short (walkable) distance away for the weekly Athens Locally Grown pickup, so you can observe how my market works from beginning to end. The day will be free for all locallygrown.net market managers, but you’ll need to get your own lodging. Please let me know if you plan on attending so I can be sure to have enough space. The Georgia Organics website (link below) has info about hotels with conference rates.

The Georgia Organics conference runs from Friday through Sunday. It is not free, but will be well worth attending. Guests include Carlo Petrini (the founder of Slow Food) and Woody Tasch (the founder of Slow Money). A limited number of farmer scholarships are available (deadline soon!), and you can learn all about the conference at http://georgiaorganics.org/conference.

I am leading a session Saturday afternoon at the GO conference on the Locally Grown system. If you do decide to stay for the conference and would like to join me, talking about your experience setting up and running a virtual market, please let me know! I’d love to have two other market managers with me.

The other yearly conference I always attend is the Southern SAWG conference, running from January 20 through 23 in Chattanooga, TN. I like this conference so much, locallygrown.net is a sponsor. From that, I’ve got two conference passes I’d like to offer to two locallygrown.net market managers. If you would like to attend the conference but cannot for financial reasons, please let me know. I can’t cover your rooms or extras (such as field trips), but I can get you into the conference, including the keynote dinner. You can find out more about this wonderful conference, and Southern SSAWG in general, at www.ssawg.org.

I think that’s all the conference news. Here are the new features:

• Sales report now generates much faster. It also now includes the generation date, like the other reports.
• When generating the “All Invoices” document, any invoices with no products get pushed to the front of the document with a big note on it, instead of crashing the entire report. If you see this, and that customer only placed that one order, you’ll want to contact them so they don’t show up for nothing.
• Fixed a problem calculating grower sales when an order is edited by changing the quantity sold (such as from “2” to “1”).
• Added a link that sets all products with zero or negative quantities as unavailable. This is saving me about a half hour a week!
• Added a “monogram” to the product labels, consisting of the first two letters of the customer’s last name. This should really help locating the exact bag of, say, carrots, especially in low light situations. Like during winter.
• Added a Textile pop-up reference to all of the text boxes on the site that accept formatting. Hopefully having this at your fingertips will help you make your text look pretty.
• Added CSV export of order totals, so you can bring them into Excel, Quickbooks, or other programs. This is totals only, not line items. You can export open orders, your orders for the entire year, or last year, or for all time.

There are some back-end infrastructure items I’m working on as well. My servers aren’t at their limits yet, but the system has grown quite a bit this year so I’m in the process of upgrading those resources.

I’ve also got a good number of things on my to-do list as well. I’ll continue to work on adding useful features, simplifing things I don’t quite have exactly right, and generally making things easier and better for you, your growers, and your customers. If you have any wishlists of your own, please send them to me. Thank you!

A Locally Grown Conference?

I’ve been wanting to hold a mini conference regarding online farmers markets (and of course locallygrown specifically) here in Athens for a while. It turns out that the 2010 Georgia Organics annual conference (always one of the best in the country — last year’s featured Michael Pollan and Will Allen) will be held in here in Athens on February 19th & 20th, a Friday & Saturday. My Athens Locally Grown market is held on Thursday, so I’ve got a great opportunity to piggyback my notion onto the GO conference.

Would any of you be interested in coming to Athens for a get together on Wednesday the 17th and Thursday the 18th of February, culminating in attending my market pickup that Thursday evening? I think it’d be great to bounce ideas off each other face to face, to share in our experiences and so forth. I’m sure I can put something together at no cost to you, other than your food & lodging, and you’d be able to stay in town if you wanted for the GO conference as well (which isn’t free, but is totally worth it).

Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll start putting things together. You can learn more about Georgia Organics at http://www.georgiaorganics.org.