When typing in the WYSIWYG editor then switching to code view, via the HTML button, it is very messy.  There are no line breaks

Why don't you just type in code then???

Uhh, because the WYSIWYG is set to default and a button is, usually, faster than typing in <pwqijefpoeijf>whatever</pwqijefpoeijf>

 
Surely, we never expect people to use code view by default. After all, even if you are the best HTML expert ever, clicking a button is definitely easier than typing lengthy lines of code.

You are absolutely right about the line breaks in the code view – but this is true for many other blogging platforms. So when I edit posts in Wordpress and I need to use code view, I first find the line breaks and separate them and only then I do the editing I need.  Of course, I do not suggest you doing the same – certainly, writing in WYSIWYG is a better option and I will have our guys see if it is possible to make the code view less messy for you and other users facing similar problem.

Leaving the site while writing a new post by accidentally pressing the back/forward/bookmark/home/any button key completely gets rid of post.

Why don't you just Save as draft

Well, you see (presses Save as draft)... it takes you OUT of the post.  And don't even tell me about the Save button... a.k.a. PUBLISH.

I am not a developer myself but as far as I know these back and forward buttons are the most difficult problem for AJAX applications. You can see that whenever you are on Profy (except when viewing your own blog or blogs by other users) the URL in your browser address bar never changes (it is constantly http://alpha.profy.com). So whenever you do something with your browser buttons, you will be taken away from the product completely – which is bad but can not be fixed with the existing technologies.

I will definitely see to it that we have automatic saving on our roadmap for the future releases. But there is one thing about the writing process that you may not have noticed but that may be a nice surprise for you. You may have noticed that when you start writing a new post a new tab is opened (it is named ‘Write’) and unless you close the Profy tab completely you can do whatever you want inside the product and your post will stay intact in this tab. For example, you can go and browse some of your other posts or you can even go to feed reader or answer some new comments – the post you are editing will remain as it is. So saving your posts as drafts is only necessary if you want to close the browser tab or window or log out of the product – otherwise you can resume editing from where you leave it any time you want. I hope this can sugar-coat a bitter truth for you a little!

Yesterday I realized that I had absolutely forgotten to update the special Profy group on Facebook – I was too busy after the alpha launch, I think.

So I have finally got to updating it – added some screenshots and useful links to the initial reviews of the Profy blogging platform. So I would like to invite all my readers and each and every early Profy user to join the Profy group on Facebook and use it as a place for any discussions related to your testing experience.

Also I could not avoid building a special product page for Profy on Facebook – I think it is the hottest trend on Facebook now and I bump into pages of my friends’ websites everywhere on Facebook. So if you like the trend and want to show your connection to Profy during this early stage, I invite you to become a fan of Profy on Facebook and share this page with your friends you think might be interested in the Profy blogging platform.

And if you are willing to connect to me personally on Facebook, feel free to add me to your network – I am the admin of both the page and the group – and I love connecting to new people sharing my interests.

First of all, it is important to understand that your Profy “friend” is not necessary your real-life (or online) friend – when you add a person to your network, you automatically will receive updates from his or her blog. In your feed reader you will see the posts from your friends in a special ‘Friends’ Feeds’ folder (but you can move them to other folders as well, of course). Of course, it is not required to add a blogger to your network to be able to subscribe to his or her blog – you can simply use RSS feed of the blog to subscribe in the feed reader.

Keep in mind that when you add a user to your network, this user will be able to see you in his network – this is what the ‘Who Befriended Me’ folder is for. So if you do not want a user to see that you are subscribed to his or her blog, you should not add this user as your friend and you should also choose appropriate privacy settings in your profile – for example, you should choose ‘Only me’ for ‘Show feeds that I read to’.

If you do not want other users to be able to see your own friends on Profy, do not forget to choose ‘Only me’ for ‘Show my friends list to’.

But adding a user to your network means that you will not only be able to easier access the blog authored by this user, but you will also be able to easier access this user from your network. If you go to My Network -> People -> My Friends folder, you will see the list of all the people that you have added to your network.

From this folder you can easily access information about all your friends. If you hover cursor over the name of a user, you will be able to see a pop-up window with the available information about this user: avatar, online/offline status, birthday, location. It is also possible to use this pop-up window to remove the user from your network, view the user’s blog and list of friends and subscriptions, and start talking to the user via the internal private instant messaging system.

The same information can be accessed by clicking on a user’s name – this will show the user profile in expanded view. It is also possible to use the ‘Switch to expanded view’ link in the lower left part of the screen to scroll down the list of all your friends and see their information in one place – for example when you remember what a person’s avatar looks like but do not remember the name and want to contact this particular user.

The most important social features on Profy are related to reading blogs, obviously – for every user that has chosen to make his or her list of subscriptions available to other users, you will be able to browse through the blogs this user is subscribed to on Profy. The best thing is that you can not only browse the feeds – it is also possible to easily subscribe to the blogs from this list so that posts from these blogs are delivered to your Profy feed reader.

Another sweet thing that is intended to enhance your networking with other bloggers and readers on Profy, is the private messaging system. For any user from any place of the system you can send a private message by clicking the ‘Open Dialogue’ link – this will start a dialogue between you where you will be able to exchange messages. You can access your latest messages via the ‘Inbox’ section and from the dashboard – for this you have the ‘Latest Messages’ widget. When you receive private messages, you will see the number of new messages near the ‘Inbox’ link everywhere on Profy.

And more social features are in the works already for you to be able to communicate easier and in a more comprehensive manner with other Profy users. So stay tuned for enhanced social networking on Profy.

Here is what the user code-named i.l. (I know the name and the person but thought that maybe he would prefer to stay anonymous here?) had to say about Profy networking functionality:

I think it would be really interesting if I could find friends or browse people on profy.

Update: the friends search returns no results in FF/Win, but I do get results in IE 7.  The online flag sure seems to work, but I'm not sure if/how the text input works.  For example, searching for "m" in users returned a bunch of people with no m in their name (juan) and no m in their profile.  Will keep looking.

First the report on searching for just something (like the letter “m” in the example): the thing is that when you do not use advance search on Profy, the engine will search for all the fields in profiles of all the users (including their interests, for example) – so chances are you will invariably get at least a few result to your request. If you use something more complex, you may not find anything at all if you do not know what you are looking for.

As for the general idea of looking for friends on Profy, here is what I can offer:

First of all, you can always see who is online at any given moment of time. For that you can go to ‘My Network’ section and in the ‘People’ folder (this combination is the default one so if you have just arrived you do not need to click anything else) apply filter ‘online only’ from the ‘Online status’ drop-down menu:

This will show you all the online users on Profy.

If you do not apply the filter (or search words), this will show you the list of the latest registered Profy users. If you type anything in the ‘Enter search word’ field, you will get search results (that you will also be able to see for users that are currently online/offline or all users by choosing the appropriate option from the drop-down menu above.

Another option to search for people you may want to connect with on Profy, is to use Advanced search (available by clicking the link of the same name to the right from the ‘Search’ button. Clicking this button will open the ‘Advanced Search’ window for you where you will be able to choose what exactly you are looking for.

For example, you can look for something in the full name of the person you want to find on Profy (say, you want to find all the users named “Svetlana” here). Or you can look for the users from a certain country with their name not containing “John”.

It is also possible to simply browse all the users from some country or a specific town – if you want to connect to bloggers based on their geographic location.

It is also possible to search for users of a specific age and older (or younger) a specific age.

You can also use avatars as a search criterion – there is a check field you can use to see all the users that have uploaded an avatar to their profiles.

And, finally, you can choose to search for specific interests in the users’ profiles if you want to connect with like-minded people, for example.

And there is another way to find new people on Profy as well. If you already have some friends on Profy, you can view their friends as well (provided your friends did not choose to keep their friends’ lists private, of course) – chances are you will find some people you will want to connect with on Profy.

I hope I have managed to outline the approach to finding people you would be interested in connecting with on Profy. In the next post I will describe what your connections will mean on Profy and how you can benefit from having people in your network.
 

I have a feature question. I read your most recent blog post and found some content that I wanted to capture and comment on in my own Profy blog. I hit the Blog It! button at the bottom of the post and it took your post and posted it to my own Profy blog. There was no reference or credit given to your blog, it simply looks like I created the post on my own blog. I'm wondering about ownership issues here. If I Blog It! someone's Profy post, shouldn't it be apparent somewhere that I am quoting that person's post?

Also, is there a way to capture something from the web or from the Profy community directly into a blog post? A 'blog this' bookmarklet of some kind? If I see something on the web, whats the best way to get it into my Profy blog post?

As for the ‘Blog it’ feature, your comment proves that we have a usability problem here as you are the second user reporting on it.

The thing is when you use ‘Blog It!’ function on someone else’s post, it actually pastes the text to your own post and adds a link to this post below the text (Source):

But I believe the link is not enough since wo users have already reported that they can’t see any accreditation so I believe we should both make the ‘Source’ link more visible (bold maybe?) and possibly use Indent to show the quotation. Maybe it would also be a good idea to add the name of the blog (or title of the blog post you use) instead of the Source link. I hope such measures will improve the situation and people will see the accreditation better after that. But if you (and by you I mean any Profy user reading this post, of course) have other ideas, I will appreciate you sharing them in the comments below so that we knew what the community opinion is.

As for sharing something you find on the web, we do not have any bookmarklet for this – so it is only possible to share anything you find in the feeds you are subscribed to with the ‘Blog it’ feature again.

But the idea of a special bookmarklet is awesome and I think it will be a great addition to the blogging tools we have now. This way you will be able to share anything you find on the web in your Profy blog. We will start coding browser tools very soon so that users could easily subscribe to feeds right from their browsers. And building a special bookmarklet to share absolutely any page on your Profy blog is a great idea we will definitely use. Thank you!

Here is what Andrew Hemingway wanted to know:

We are trying to add Google AdSense to our site, but we have to put something in the coding. How do we do that? Will the html function in the content editor work? Or do you have to add this feature in for us. Can you please let me know. Are there any analytics built into the site?

I guess many users have already noticed that Profy is one of only a handful of blogging platforms that actually allow for bloggers to show ads on their blogs (we have no limitations for that) and earn money without having to deal with hosting and other standalone blogs issues. But for the time being we have not created any special plug-ins to make this possible.

Actually if you use HTML editor in the blog posts editor, you will need to insert the code for every single post you create. So what I can recommend you is as follows:

Go to the Blog -> Layout tab

When you configure the layout of your blog, you can use the link ‘Add a page element’ in the lower left corner of the layout editing screen to add a new widget. From the list of available widgets choose the ‘Custom Code’ to add any HTML/JavaScript code as a widget for your blog. Here you can paste the code that you can get from your Google AdSense account.

After adding the widget, you can drag and drop layout elements to arrange everything the way you want your readers to see it on your blog.

If you use Google AdSense do not forget that in your account should be properly configured to allow your ads to be displayed on your Profy blog. Make sure that in AdSense Setup tab => Allowed Sites you either have ‘Allow any site to show ads for my account ’ (this is the default setting) or have added your Profy blog URL in the list of allowed sites.

And do not forget to check the publishers policy and ToS of the advertising network you use to display ads on your Profy blog not to violate some of the conditions.

Regarding analytics, for the time being we do not have any built-in tools for users to track their visitors. Such tools will definitely be added in the future but unfortunately the alpha version lacks such functionality. For the time being I think the best option is to add a widget for Google Analytics to your blog. This widget can be configured as you want it to be and added to your blog via the Custom Code widget from the Layout tab.

And keep in mind that there are tons of great widgets on WidgetBox and other websites that you can use via the Custom Code for your Profy blog. I will try to add a widget for my Twitter updates here as soon as I click the Publish button.

And do not forget to let me know about the great widgets that you use to enhance your Profy blog so that I could share this knowledge with all the users (if you do not mind sharing, that is).

Here is what Samantha Sun had to suggest to us:

One feature that I most like to see is the ability to ‘private’ a blog. Whether it’s a leveled type permission (show to friends only, show to me only, show to members only, public) or the ability to password the entire blog (or even individual posts!). Not sure if many would agree and want to see this feature (so here’s hoping). I know there’s a visibility feature – but right now it’s all or nothing – visible to public or not.

We here understand that privacy has become a very important issue for web services and we definitely will add lots of tools to help you maintain your privacy at the level that is convenient to you. In the future you will be able to limit who can see your entire blog or separate posts – your friends, your subscribers, all Profy users, anyone.

For the time being we have decided to focus on privacy features that are related to your reading and networking – in your profile you can choose who will see what you read and who will see your friends.

There are several levels of privacy now:

• Anyone – in this case anyone will be able to see your friends and feeds you read via the widgets on your blog (currently we do not have a widget for the feeds you read, you can only show blogs from your friends)
• Subscribers – all the Profy users
• Friends – people you have added to your network as friends
• Only me – no one will be able to see the information but yourself

If privacy is important to you and you do not want to share your reading lists and your friends lists with the world, do not forget to choose the appropriate settings in the profile.

I will be looking forward to seeing further feedback from users to publish in this ‘Talking to Profy Users’ series. 

source

You are absolutely right with this suggestion. The blogroll widget is on our roadmap to be implemented and added ASAP. It will also be a default widget that any user will be able to grab easily from the list of blog elements on the Layout tab. This will make it easier for people to link to their favorite blogs outside of Profy.

Right now it is still possible to use a custom code widget (as you have done yourself) to add any text, including links to your favorite blogs.

And I would love to insert a smiley every now and then but right now I am trying to be more eloquent until we add this small (but oh so necessary) feature. I often wonder how people used to write without smileys?

So here is what he had to say about the newly released in alpha Profy blogging platform (lots of useful things if you want to know my opinion) and what I can reply to him and everyone interested:

Here's my feedback on Profy.

Reader -
The reader is the first thing I looked at. It looks like it has a lot of potential. The first thing I noticed is that the expanded view, at the bottom of the reader, is hard to spot. The second thing I noted was that there are no keyboard shortcuts, and because I'm used to Google Reader's "J," "K" and spacebar shortcuts your reader felt a bit cumbersome.

 Overall, the reader looks nice and the expanded view works really well, even the location of the expanded/list view link can be gotten past once it's spotted, but it's crucial for someone like me, with well over one hundred feeds, to be able to use keyboard shortcuts.

 
I can agree 100% that for a power user being able to use keyboard shortcuts is something we are really used to and we definitely have this on the roadmap. It has proven to be more difficult to implement than we expected so we decided to launch alpha without the shortcuts but we will add this ASAP.

Right now we decided to offer some more advanced features to sorting items in your feeds – for example, reading the posts from a certain period of time only.

As for the location of the expanded view link, putting the link in the header seemed to make the reader look rather crowded so we have decided to put it where it is and see if users will manage to change their habits. After all, we have a tabbed interface already and adding an extra tab (Google Reader style) definitely is not right.

Blogging -
The blogging platform is fairly easy to work through. The tabs are all very understandable and easy to navigate. The write tab makes sense, and I like the ability to switch between the WYSIWYG editor and the plain HTML editor. I really like the ability to easily import YouTube videos with the push of a button and the image button is also pretty straight forward. The only problem I foresee with the way it is now, is that there doesn't seem to be anywhere to locally store images.

Yes, we have tried to make the tabs as understandable as possible. I guess the best idea is that the ‘Write’ tab permits you to navigate to other tabs (to answer comments, search for the posts you want to link to and configure settings) without having to save the post – when you return to the ‘Write’ tab you will find the post exactly how you left it and can resume editing.

We have also tried to make use of your own multimedia content as easy as possible. We understand that the ability to upload your own images is important to some users but at this early stage we can not afford to offer storage space to all the users. We will eventually add upload and storage of multimedia content but chances are it will be a paid-for option.

The dashboard is very useful and an easy way to spot anything that has changed (feeds, comments, etc).

Yes, this is the main idea behind Profy – you can do everything within only one browser tab never having to move to another application. And on the dashboard you will be able to see all the changes and go directly to the sections that require your attention (reply to the new comments or messages in the inbox, for example).

Overall, this isn't the type of platform that I would generally use, but I say that mostly because I think the blogging platform is too elementary for my needs. I love the idea of combining the reader and the blog - it seems to make perfect sense.

Here's what would make me use this service:

A stronger blogging platform with more options and the ability to create my own templates and edit them etc.

Storage (images, etc)

Keyboard shortcuts, for the reader primarily, but also they would probably be useful everywhere.
Integration with other services.  I know this is a stretch and probably not something that you're in a position to work on - but, if I combined my blog and reader and a somewhat limited social network I would want to be able to combine everything else there as well. (Facebook notifications, my email, etc)

Yes, we realize that we have a long way to go to suit everyone’s needs here but this is what we are going to do. And while some of the features only depend on us, integration is the key to success as we see it. This is why as soon as the platform is ready, we will focus on integrating lots of services here for your Profy dashboard to actually become your one and only dashboard for the web.

I think you have a solid product idea with Profy, and I look forward to seeing where it goes in the future.

Thank you for the kind words and for the valuable feedback, I promise we will not disappoint you with our future development.

Profy has finally launched our very own blogging platform in alpha. We have been developing it here in Russia for more than a year now and the alpha release is a very important step. We were sitting and waiting nervously for the first reviews after the embargo was lifted and I think I will post links to some of the first reviews here to cordially thank all the bloggers.

Crenk was the first to break the story though I was a bit disappointed to see our press release almost unchanged. But you need to stick to using language from press releases when you want to break news and be the first.

Just a few minutes later the first actual review arrived from CenterNetworks. I knew Allen from CN took some time testing the product out so I was pretty worried about what his conclusions would be. But I felt instantly relieved after I read what Allen had to say because the review was much more favorable than I even dared to hope. And Allen was right on the spot about the current state of the product when he stated that at the moment the platform could be more interesting for basic bloggers as it lacks many features that experienced bloggers are accustomed to using. To reply to this, I think I should mention that the current state of the product only represents about 20% of the entire roadmap so eventually even the more experienced bloggers will find it meeting their requirements to a blogging platform.

A few hours later the review from Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch arrived which I was very happy about because getting rather a favorable review from the most powerful technology blog is definitely worth something for a startup. In fact, Eric was able to see the most important thing of the platform – that is, its “social” nature. He was even generous enough to tell

“It seems like a natural evolution, bringing the worlds of blogging and social networking closer together.”

This review was promoted to the front page of Digg and sent lots of people requesting invitations to try out Profy. Right now I am busy distributing the invitations to the people that arrived from Techcrunch, CenterNetworks, How To Split An Atom, and other blogs. If you have requested your invitation and have not received it yet, you will definitely get it in the next few days – we are not letting all the people in simultaneously because we have to watch how our servers behave not to crash everything.

A special thank you goes to all the bloggers that have already covered our launch in multiple languages that I just can not read – Chinese, Romanian, German, Italian and some other languages I could not even recognize. I don’t know if there reviews were positive or negative but anyway I am happy to see international users coming from these blogs and requesting invitations.

Finally, I would like to thank every blogger that took some time to try out our new product and to review it on his or her blog. I appreciate each and every post and we are watching closely all the comments from bloggers to know what things we should focus on in our future development. If you are a blogger and want to post a review of Profy on your own blog and distribute some invitations to your readers, shoot me an email at s.gladkova@profy.com and I will provide the instructions.

So thanks to every single blogger and user that helped us make this alpha release possible. We know perfectly well that we have a long way to go with the product but we will do our best to make Profy the perfect blogging platform that any blogger will be happy about.

UPDATE: We have also received a fabulous review from Webware. Josh Lowensohn definitely spent quite some time using and reviewing the platform and I have an impression that he has come to the conclusion that the hype around Profy is deserved.