About Plantjotter
Barb Hegman and a team of talented web developers created Plantjotter. Gardening is one of Barb’s favorite pastimes and she has been happily at it for the past 20 years while toiling way in corporate America. For years, Barb wanted a centralized organization and recordkeeping tool to help her with her garden work. She also wanted a simple system for recollections and reminders. So she decided to build Plantjotter. She hopes this tool will be helpful to you, too.
Barb understands you have a lot of time, toil and money invested in your gardening. She and her team are committed to keeping the site easy to use, secure and private. And the Plantjotter team looks forward to further enhancing the applications based on the needs of subscribers.
If you’d like to reach Plantjotter by mail the address is:
Plantjotter, LLC, 8718 Monticello Lane, Maple Grove, MN 55369 or use our contact form.
A little more information about Barb
Barb graduated from the University of St Catherine in St Paul, MN with a BA in Business Administration. She spent most of her career in the financial services industry working with 401(k) and pension plan sponsors. She eventually decided to make a change and pursue her passion in horticulture. She recently completed coursework for a Masters of Agriculture in Horticulture from the University of Minnesota and anticipates graduating in June of 2010.
A little more information about some technical details of the site.
Plantjotter was built using on Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a popular open-source framework for building browser-based applications using the Ruby language. Rails encourages good software design by separating the elements that make up your data from their presentation. It lets a developer write easy to understand code by favoring convention over configuration, leading to better long-term application maintainability. Learn more at http://rubyonrails.org.
This site is hosted by Heroku. Heroku is a leading cloud-based, managed hosting service for Ruby web applications. Visit http://heroku.com to learn more about their solid but innovative architecture.
Your data is backed up via the Heroku platform via machine snapshots of the entire application on a regular basis. Multiple versions of these backups are automatically stored on the Amazon S3 platform and are available for quick restores if needed.
Plantjotter was developed with the assistance of :coderow, a custom web application development company.
Security
We include a wide range of security measures built into our application. These include:
- UserName/Password are needed to access site
- Passwords are stored encrypted at the database
- Sensitive data (passwords) are not logged
- We Utilize SSL for login to protect credentials
- Parameters are escaped on all form submissions to avoid SQL injection issues
- Only specified parameters are allowed to be passed to the database for any model/object to avoid mass submission
- Extensive data validation for field type, size, and patterns
- Sanitize values that can be published to a page
- Utilize WC3 Specs for Posts/Gets and use them appropriately
- Session information stored server-side besides the session ID
- Include a security token on AJAX calls that includes the session ID and server side secret
- We utilize a read-only cloud-based filesystem
- All image uploads are stored on Amazon's S3 infrastructure
- We utilize Heroku for managed cloud hosting: http://heroku.com/how/architecture
- Extensive developer side (Unit and Functional) tests and a dedicated QA person to validate changes/releases
- We patch any security vulnerabilities published in the base framework and Heroku has an outstanding history of doing the same at the server
See an Example
