Uncommonly pleased

I worked through some longstanding software and hardware problems and put together a series of three short videos about total organic matter testing. This was meant to be a single video of 4 to 7 minutes in duration, but I talked a bit longer than that so I split this up into three shorter ones.

First I talked about the information gained from measuring organic matter change over time.

In the second video I explained that this type of test is measuring total organic matter, perhaps better said as total organic material, while the standard tests for soil organic matter are specifically designed to exclude much of the material one wants to measure.

Then I demonstrated what I call the killer feature of these test results—the ability to calculate the organic matter accumulation rate and the sand topdressing requirement.

Of course, I’ve made lots of videos, and while I am pleased to have resolved the software problems, it’s not the progress in that area that made me uncommonly pleased. Rather, I discovered something extraordinary: the iframe Resizer. Use of this JavaScript library makes it possible to embed a Shiny App within a web page without the usual appearance problems. Because Shiny Apps resize, putting them in a iframe typically leaves scroll bars or an app and an iframe that change size in different ways.

As an example, here’s an OM246 calculator that fits right in the page with the iframe Resizer.

The calculations are useful too, and this is something I’ve spent a lot of time working on. It seems it should be easy to calculate the change in soil organic matter, but there are a few complicating factors—converting between mass and volume, primarily—in addition to accounting for changes in soil depth and for material added and removed from the soil.

I talked about this with Joe Gulotti on the Talking Greenkeeper podcast.