Welcome to Blotanical - the much improved version of the Garden Blog Directory.

It has certainly been a labour of love putting this together but I think the results far outweigh the effort. This new site has heaps more to offer the garden blogging community in a way that could never have been achieved at the GBD.

Let me walk you through some of the new features:

Submitting Your Blog

The old GBD would take me nearly 2 hours to add half a dozen blogs to the system. With the new systems in place I processed nearly 120 blogs in less than 10 minutes. This can only be good news for all of us.

Login Features

One of the other obvious benefits of Blotanical is the ability to login and have your own space at your My Plot. This will open up the garden blogosphere to new dimensions for meeting new bloggers and finding others that you have more in common with than you first suspected.

The ability to login also allows Blotanical to be personalised to your tastes and interests and as this site develops this will become much easier and far more interesting.

Picks

This is the piece d'resistance in the Blotanical update. Firstly, you can read all the current posts that have been published from garden bloggers and keep up with what's going on and the things others are writing about.

Plus you can Pick them based on whether you like the post. The more Picks a post receives, the higher it ranks.

Favourites

This is basically your blogroll on steroids. While most garden bloggers have a roll of links they usually are sorted alphabetically rather than by preference. With Favourites you can choose your whole blogroll, plus a few more, and rank them according to your preference.

This is turn acts as a weighted vote to that blog and lifts them up in the rankings as well.

To Come

Over the next few weeks I hope to explain a few more of the changes that you will find at Blotanical and answer any questions and problems that users may encounter.

I would love to hear your thoughts, both positive and negative, about this new site and hope that you will enjoy it and be able to use it heaps.