I think it’s about time that I add some flashy and beautiful content to this blog so I thought I’d share some photos and videos with you here.

So first of all a few photos from the Web 2.0 Expo where Profy was one of the sponsors and had a nice booth that attracted lots of people.

First here are the photos showing how we brought the booth to San Francisco: those two large suitcases actually contain the entire booth and actually they did not meet any airlines regulations. But somehow we managed to bring them to New York from Moscow and then on to San Francisco. I think it was worth it!

When finally delivered to San Francisco and installed, the booth itself looked like this – very bright and green:

And this photo was taken at the very end of the last conference day. (Left to right: Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, our editor, and me.) We are very exhausted here but equally happy!

After all the hassle with bringing the booth to San Francisco, we decided it would not be very reasonable to carry them back home so no photos of the return trip with the huge suitcases here.

If you want to see all the photos from the Web 2.0 Expo we made, here is the link to the entire set on Flickr.

I have also spent quite some time yesterday choosing the best video hosting service to upload Profy video demo. Of course, it is accessible at http://beta.profy.com/demo but I thought I’d need to have it on some video sharing sites as well so here is the link to Profy demo on Vimeo and on YouTube as well. I’d love it if you spent a moment of your time to choose this video as your favorite on one of the services and help me spread the word – after all, Profy will be more fun with more bloggers here.

And after working on this, I must say that Vimeo is definitely my favorite now, the quality is superb and they definitely do the job the way it should be done. You can see that it actually works great by viewing the embedded demo below:

Profy blogging platform demo from Svetlana Gladkova on Vimeo.

And finally, yesterday I finally got to testing the new service called Docstoc that helps you share and embed documents. I like the service itself and I like how it does the job in allowing me to embed the Powerpoint presentation of the Profy platform to a blog post:

Profy-presentation - Get more documents

So that’s about it, I’ll try to share my further endeavors with videos and graphics on this blog in the future not to bore you with only plain text posts.

Shame on me for being so silent after we returned from the Web 2.0 Expo. In fact, such events are really crazy when you have a booth there and hundreds of people stop by the booth to see what this new name means and what we do at Profy. But no matter how crazy it has been for us, we are very happy about the results and the feedback from people – it feels great when you realize that people actually like the platform from the very first seconds of watching the demo. So I want to thank everyone who has stopped by our booth to say hi (I still have to send all the follow-up emails) and to everyone who blogged about the Profy platform and helped us spread the word.

So here are the links to some of the blog posts covering Profy during and after the Web 2.0 Expo for those of you who want to read what other people think about Profy:

The new star of the web 2.0 blogging Louis Gray published a very detailed and thoughtful review of the platform here. I am especially happy that he went as far as actually enabling crossposting from Profy to his main blog (that is based on Blogger.com) and demonstrated how seamless it really is.

Allen Stern from CenterNetworks continues to support us with covering our development – he announced the Profy beta in a new post of his here. I personally am very sorry about missing Allen at the TechCrunch May 1^st meetup in NYC where I arrived minutes after he left.

After the conference was actually over, I had a chance to visit Josh Lowensohn from Webware in CNET office in San Francisco to show him the new features added to Profy beta and this resulted in a great new post about Profy here.

I was also interviewed by David Knight and he published the interview here for anyone to be able to get more details on our future plans for Profy. It is absolutely awesome to have such users as David who help us spread the word about Profy.

I am still waiting for some more articles to air after I was interviewed by prominent bloggers and journalists in San Francisco. I will update this post when further publications arrive. And of course, I will be happy to list your thoughts on Profy here as well if you publish them elsewhere – so go ahead and help us make Profy big!

I also wanted to mention that during the conference we met some excellent developers from various startups and established web companies and agreed on prospective integrations of their products with Profy. I think I’d better keep silent about this for now as such integrations will be announced by us when actually implemented. But believe me, the integrations we have in mind will make your Profy experience even better and will add further exciting aspects to “All Things Blogging” on Profy. 

Today is a very big day for the entire Profy team as we are launching Profy beta at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. So first of all I would like to thank all our alpha users for their valuable feedback and for helping us bring Profy to the next level. We know perfectly well that we are not building Profy for ourselves – it is your blogging platform and your opinion and your wishes matter the most here so we are still looking forward to hearing from you to know where we should take Profy in its further development.

You might want to know what changes we have introduced today? So first of all we have focused on improving and stabilizing the current functionality. We have fixed all the bugs our alpha users helped us find and improved the platform’s performance in general so it works faster and more reliably now.

And, obviously, there are some new features added as well:

Crossposting:

You can now use your Profy blog to manage your blogs even if they are not based on Profy – we have made it possible for you to crosspost your Profy posts to your blogs on Blogger and Livejournal. Sure enough, more platforms coming soon so stay tuned as we are working hard to make Profy your real one-stop platform for blogging.

Tagging people:

Even in alpha you could use tags to identify posts in your own blog and in your feed reader. Now we take tagging on Profy to the new level – you can tag your friends on Profy to organize them and to make it easier for yourself to find people when you want to contact them privately, for example.

Modifications to the top panel on your blogs:

We have modified a lot the top panel you see when you view your own blog or blogs by other users. Now it is possible to report spam blogs or blogs with otherwise inappropriate content. You can also login easier to your own dashboard using this top panel and new users can create their own blogs when they like what they find on your blog, for example.

Subscription to blogs written by your friends:

We have changed the process of subscribing to blogs created by your Profy friends – you will now be able to choose if you actually want to read your friend’s blog.

Invitations:

While we have significantly reduced waiting time for invitations approvals (in fact, we have enabled them to be approved automatically unless the servers experience the load they can’t cope with), we decided that we were not perfectly ready for open registration yet (we simply did not want our current users to experience downtime while the new bloggers arrive). But all the current and new users receive 5 invitations to invite their friends to Profy by email so if you want to share your Profy experience with your friends, feel free to do so now – your friends will be let in immediately and they won’t have to wait for their invites to be approved.

So again, thank you for being with us from the very beginning, we will be looking forward to hearing your feedback. Happy blogging

San Francisco, CA, April 23, 2008 – At Web 2.0 Expo today, Profy is announcing the beta launch of its new Web platform for bloggers. Profy’s integrated solution supports a full range of advanced AJAX blogging applications to satisfy the most demanding and experienced bloggers yet features a simple user interface that novices will find immediately accessible.

The Profy platform underwent closed alpha testing in the first quarter of 2008. During this phase, it received positive reviews from prominent bloggers. Techcrunch’s Eric Schonfeld pronounced it a “social blogging platform” and “a natural evolution” of blogging. Profy has paid very close attention to the feedback from its alpha users and in the new beta version responds with performance improvements and important new functionality incorporating their suggestions.

Profy’s vision is to provide a single point of comprehensive seamless access and friendly navigation for the various stages of the blogging process – news reading, writing and publishing posts, discussing posts with readers, and otherwise communicating with readers and other bloggers. In short, Profy aims to provide – in one place – all the creative tools a blogger could want.

Profy’s platform is differentiated by its attention to the social aspects of blogging. It provides bloggers with tools to easily find people with common interests, communicate with them publicly and privately, and discover from them new sources of information. The combination of these features makes for a more “social” blogging experience, and virtually eliminates the possibility that bloggers will feel lonely because no one can find their creations easily.

Profy has chosen to announce its beta launch at the industry’s most influential event – Web 2.0 Expo, taking place in San Francisco at Moscone West April 22-25, 2008. To see first-hand how the Profy platform really differs from conventional blogging applications, visit the Profy team at Booth 940.

“We firmly believe that developers shouldn’t build web products for themselves but should build them for users,” says Profy CEO Ilya Korsun. “This is why we invite all bloggers to try out our platform, share their opinions with us, and tell us what functionality would really give them a better blogging experience. For our part, we will work hard to make the Profy platform the most blogger-friendly solution for all things blogging.”

About Profy, Inc.: Profy is a San Francisco-based company headed by Internet entrepreneur Ilya Korsun. The development team works out of Novosibirsk, Russia. The Profy platform has been in development since September 2006. The alpha version was launched in January 2008. For further information, visit http://www.profy.com.

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MEDIA CONTACT:
Svetlana Gladkova
Vice President, Business Development, Profy
Phone:     +1 415 830 6309
Email:        s.gladkova@profy.com

If you follow the main Profy blog, you may have noticed that nice banner in the sidebar announcing Profy participation in the Web 2.0 Expo that will take place in San Francisco on April 22-25. For us this is not some ordinary event – this is the first time the Profy blogging platform will be publicly announced at a major industry event.

This means that we are also going to make a big announcement at the conference – Profy beta will be launched with tons of improvements and interesting new features suggested by our early alpha users.

To get ready for the event and for the attention that we hope to receive for the new Profy blogging platform there, we need to do some preparation in advance and it involves reconfiguring our servers to support better performance of the platform itself. Unfortunately, it also results in the necessity to take the Profy alpha down on Thursday morning and keep it down until Profy beta is officially launched.

So if you are among our alpha users, I have to ask for your understanding of the fact that the platform will be unavailable for the nearest couple of weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience but I hope your patience will be compensated for when you see what we are getting ready to launch. If you are new and want to be able to start blogging on Profy when the platform is launched in beta, you will still be able to request to be notified when we are ready to let you in. Remember, our major principle is that it is the end user to decide what the ideal blogging process should look like – so we will be happy to have you with us and to hear what you have to say about how you want to blog.

And since I started with the importance of the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco for us, I would like to invite everyone to visit our team in our booth at the event (booth 940, it should be easy to spot as it is located right near the Long Tail Pavilion). So if you are planning to be at the Web 2.0 Expo and have a moment, stop by to say hello as we will be very happy to see all our early users and Profy readers there. If you are planning to participate at the event but have not registered yet, you have a chance to pay less or even get to the expo floor free of charge. If you register using a special Profy code websf08co46, you will receive $100 discount off any conference registration fee. Remember, if you only want to visit the expo hall itself and do not plan to participate in the workshops and sessions, there is a $100 expo pass – and this one you can get absolutely for free with Profy using the same code. So here is another reason for you to visit the event – you can actually get to the expo hall and meet numerous internet professionals there absolutely for free! See you at the Web 2.0 Expo!

Today I realized that I have not claimed my authorship of this blog on Technorati yet. And since usually Technorati is the first tool the majority of bloggers use to make their blogs noticed by other bloggers, I have decided to correct this by claiming this Profy blog.

Obviously, I already have an account on Technorati that owns our multi-author Profy blog (I will appreciate you adding this blog to your favorites, of course, if you like reading our posts). If you do not have an account yet, you will have to register first.

After signing in to Technorati if you want to claim a new blog (claiming a blog means that you show and prove that you are the author of this blog), you will need to go to your account. To do so, click the ‘Edit’ link located to the right from your user name:

In the account editing screen choose the ‘Blogs’ section. This section shows all the blogs you already write and manage along with their properties (the blog authority, the number of incoming links to these blogs, and the number of people that added these blogs as their favorites).

In the end of the list of your claimed blogs you will see a special ‘Claim a Blog’ pane where you can initiate process of claiming your blog:

Type (or paste) the URL of your Profy blog (in my case it is http://svetlana.profy.com) and click ‘Begin Claim’ button to initiate claiming process.

Doing so will take you to the step 2 of the process: choosing the claim method. The only option available for Profy blogs is “Post Claim”: it means that to claim your blog you will need to write a new blog post on Profy and include a special link to this post – this link will show Technorati that you are the owner of the blog.

So after you click “Use Post Claim”, you will be taken to step 3:

In this step you will receive a special code generated by Technorati for its spiders to identify this blog as yours. You will need to paste this code in a new post on Profy in HTML mode:

Publish this blog post. On your blog it will look like this:

After the post is published (make you sure it is live on your blog using the “View blog” button), you will need to return to the browser window where you have the step 3 of claiming process on Technorati and click “Release the Spiders!” button. After this step is completed, Technorati will crawl your blog to find the code it needs to verify that you are really the author of the blog being claimed.

And finally, in the last step you will be given the opportunity to edit settings of your blog on Technorati: add a 250 characters description, choose your blog’s language, add tags to help people discover your blog (usually the more tags you add, the easier it will be for people to find your blog).

Here you will also be able to get the HTML code that you can use on your blog to invite your readers to make your blog one of their Technorati favorites:

The procedure to add one of the buttons to your Profy blog is as follows:

1. Copy the code for the button you like to the Clipboard.
2. Go to Profy -> Blog ->Layout.
3. Click ‘Add a page element’ link to add a new widget. Choose ‘Custom Code’ widget.

6. Click Ok.
7. Drag and drop the new widget in the Layout configuration tab to choose the place where you want it to appear.
8. Click ‘View blog’ to make sure the widget looks exactly like you want it to on your blog. Here you can see what it looks like on my blog placed between my tags and the widget displaying my Twitter updates. You can see it to the left from this text already.

So you are done adding the widget to your blog.

Now that you have completed all the steps and configured the blog settings on Technorati, click ‘Save Blog Info’ to complete the process:

As soon as Technorati crawlers complete their job, you will see your blog added to the list of your claimed blogs with all the properties they have:

Now you can delete the post you wrote to claim the blog – it will not be needed in the future. I have decided to leave mine live on Profy as an example.

You will always be able to edit Technorati settings for your blog, get code for a new widget or even delete this blog from the list of your claimed blogs later should you need to do so.

Happy writing and growing your authority on Technorati!

I have just been asked a question by our user Zigmas Bigelis that I thought I should share with all our users.

How do I write a new post when I am viewing my own Profy blog?

Unfortunately, right now it is impossible to start writing a new blog post right within your own blog when you view it. For the time being, writing a new blog post takes going to http://alpha.profy.com, logging in (if you are logged out), going to the Blog section and clicking the ‘Write a new post’ button.

But at the moment we are working on modification of the upper toolbar (the grey one you can see above all the content of my blog right now if you are not reading this in a feed reader). This toolbar will give you more control of the blog. For example, the toolbar will have a special ‘Write a new post’ link – clicking it will take you directly to the blog editor to write a new post.

Besides, we will add links for any reader of any blog (no matter if the reader is a registered Profy user or not) to be able to report a spam blog or a blog with some illegal or objectionable content. After all, we all know how quickly free blogging platforms start to attract spammers, sploggers and various creators of pornographic blogs.

So in addition to the link that sends you to your dashboard, the toolbar will help any logging in user to access more functionality right from the Profy blog he or she is browsing at the moment. And we will also simplify logging in process from this same toolbar as well so stay tuned for the new toolbar to make your Profy experience smoother. 

Today I have a new question from Louis Le regarding commenting on Profy blogs. He seems to have a great experience in hunting for bugs and usability deficiencies, by the way.


This is a known usability bug that our coders promise to fix very soon because you are the second user already (I was the first one) that is not satisfied with having to click and scroll so many times when you simply want to leave a comment to a post.

Here is the description of how it will work when fixed:

• Each blog post (even when viewed from the blog’s main page) will have 2 links right below the post’s content: the existing one that shows the number of comments and another one (‘Reply’) that will permit you to post your own comment without having to view all the previous comments first.
• When you click any of the above links (number of comments if you want to read the comments or ‘Reply’ when you want to send your own reply to the post), you will be taken directly to the place of the screen that you need (to the comments or to the commenting form depending on which link you clicked) without having to scroll through the entire post content first.

If you (and by you I mean any Profy user here) have other ideas about how commenting could be arranged better, leave your comments below or shoot us an email using the red link above to discuss your suggestions.


You are absolutely right, we are reworking the commenting system right now to allow more readers to submit comments to Profy blogs. In addition to allowing for comments from guests, we will also integrate OpenID support for any user to be able to leave a comment (and his or her details) using the proven identity without additional obstacles.


When you choose the ‘Moderated Comments’ mode from the ‘Comments Mode’ drop-down menu, all the comments submitted by your readers will go to your moderation queue first.



You will be able to see the comments in the ‘Comments’ tab of the ‘Blog’ section.

All the comments that are awaiting moderation have the crossed eye sign next to them.



To approve the comments and have them appear on your blog you will simply have to click this sign – it will result in the sign change from crossed eye to a normal open eye and the comment will appear under the blog post.



Unfortunately, as of now the comments are under code refactoring and this particular feature is not very stable so you may have difficulties approving the comments. And since Profy is not a very densely-populated blogging platform and it has not attracted spammers yet, I believe that it is absolutely safe to use the default option to allow all comments (you will always be able to hide them from public view or delete whenever you feel like doing so).

But when your blog starts to attract some spammers or comments you would prefer not to see on your blog you will always be able to resume using moderated mode for comments – especially since it only takes one click to approve a comment.

Our Vietnamese user Louis that asked a question about the posts formatting yesterday actually had quite a number of questions to ask so I think I will publish several posts to answer them here. So here is today’s question:

This question has actually revealed a bug in the system that we have not noticed ourselves and that we will have to fix.

The thing is that a certain limitation actually exists and is due to the space allocated to any blog post in the database. Currently the limit for a blog post length is 17,000 characters of formatted text or 60,000 characters of non-formatted text. Now that we have found this limitation (it was actually configured through an oversight) we will eliminate it to enable users that are accustomed to writing long posts to write as much as they want to. In the meanwhile I have to say I am sorry about this inconvenience and ask for your patience with this matter.