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.

Yesterday I received an email from one of our Vietnamese users where he reported a problem that may be interesting to many early Profy users as well so I wanted to discuss these issues here in a special post.

So here is what Louis Le had to say:

I put in 3 posts in the blog. What is the reason the first post takes the whole post's area, but the other posts occupy only half of the post's area? Is it possible to have a uniform appearance for all posts, i.e. they occupy the whole post's area?

I have taken a look at your blog and actually was very surprised to see some of your posts were almost twice as wide as the others. Since we did not encounter such a problem before we had to investigate it to find the reason and we have found that such a situation is only possible when a post contains many HTML tags that are generated by rich text processors, such as Microsoft Word.

Some other blog editors I have worked with have a special button to paste text from MS Word directly. This button clears all the unnecessary HTML tags from the text you copy from Word to your clipboard and pastes the plain text to your blog post. Unfortunately right now we do not have such an option on Profy so when you experience problems with how your posts are displayed, I would recommend using NotePad (or another plain text editor) to paste text to Profy.

When your Word document does not contain complex formatting (for example, the document only contains text, links and some lists), it will be inserted perfectly fine because such tags are not difficult for Profy blog editor to handle but when you use some of the more advanced features of MS Word to format your text, it may cause difficulties with pasting the content of your document to a blog post.

In the future we will also add functionality to clear unnecessary tags and formatting from your text but for now if you want to write a blog post based on some complex document, I would recommend follow the procedure:

1. Copy text from MS Word (or another text processor you use) to clipboard.
2. Paste text from the clipboard to NotePad (or another plain text editor).
3. Copy text from the NotePad document to clipboard again.
4. Paste text from clipboard to your blog post.

As a summary I want to emphasize again that for the majority of MS Word documents that do not contain very complex formatting pasting the text to your blog posts directly via clipboard will work fine but for the complex documents it is recommended to use NotePad first to remove excessive HTML tags.

Here is what Bob from Prague had to say about a problem he has experienced with Profy (by the way, I honestly enjoy that we already have people on Profy from so many places around the globe, from Czech Republic to Vietnam):

Latest feeds don't show up in the Dashboard after adding a couple of new feeds (with posts clearly visible in the Feed reader view).

And below is my comment on the problem:

You are absolutely right, Bob, currently new items take longer to appear in the dashboard widgets than they do in the respective sections of the platform. For example, after you send a message to a user using the instant messaging system (‘Inbox’ section), it will appear immediately in the dialogue and in the outgoing messages but it will take some time to appear in your ‘Latest Messages’ widget on the dashboard.

This problem is due to a problem in automatic refreshing of the dashboard widgets that our coders are working on right now. Currently you can always refresh content of any dashboard widget by clicking the small ‘refresh’ button located in the upper right corner of every widget:

Eventually when we fix this bug, the automatic refreshing will work more stable and you won’t need to use these buttons frequently. Stay tuned to follow the progress!

This post is very difficult for me to write and publish because this is the first time we have had a very serious failure of the Profy platform and it was due to our own mistake.

Some of you may have noticed yesterday that many pages on Profy resulted in 404 error. The problem is that due to a system failure we faced a problem with the database yesterday and our developers spent the last day working hard on restoring everything they could on Profy.

Unfortunately this resulted in an 8-hour downtime of the platform during which it was absolutely impossible to access anything on Profy. But to our relief we have managed to get almost all the user data back intact – only the data generated from February 9 to 12 was lost without any chances of restoration. I’m afraid that if you published a post during this period or received a comment on your post, it would be lost forever.

So on behalf of the entire Profy team I would like to apologize for this incident and ask for your understanding. Now that we have faced this problem once, we know where a problem can happen and how to prevent it in the future. So we will work even harder from now on to avoid repetition of similar problems in the future and to make the platform’s performance more stable and predictable.

I would also like to remind everyone that for the alpha testing period we do not recommend our alpha testers to use Profy for any purpose but testing because even now that we know how to prevent such problems, we can not guarantee 100% that no user data will be lost in the future. Thank you for your understanding and for being a part of the Profy testing team, your feedback and your participation are extremely important and valuable for us, I hope this incident will not make you turn around from our platform. We promise that eventually it will be the best product for your needs – but any great product has to face some challenges on the road of actually becoming the best one. 

I have been browsing the blogs written by Profy users today and found an interesting question in a post by Adam Pieniazek so I decided that it is definitely worth an answer:

So, what is profy all about?

Why should I use this rather than host my own blog?

Any advantages to this platform over wordpress?

This place looks cool for people without hosted sites, but as for myself, it's back to my blog for now. Check back in later.

Profy is different mainly in two aspects:

• Here you have a network of people you can communicate with and discuss content of your own blog and their blogs as well. It is important that you will automatically be subscribed to blogs of your friends once you add them to your network. Another thing that is worth mentioning is that for any friend you can browse their reading lists as well to discover some new interesting content they read (provided that it is allowed by their privacy settings).

• Due to the integrated feed reader you can use Profy for all your blogging needs: you can start by reading your favorite blogs and news sources, click “Blog It!” under any blog post and write your own post based on this news you find interesting. After your post is published, you can continue to discussing it with your Profy friends using instant messaging or blog comments. This is why we are talking about “All things blogging in one place”.

So here is where Profy differs from other existing blogging platforms, here is what makes us unique.

As for using Profy rather than hosting your own blog, there is a twist here. Actually right now we understand perfectly well that Profy does not provide enough functionality for power users, especially those that write on their hosted blogs (like you do). But as we add further features to Profy, we will make it more suitable for experienced users. We will also make it possible for you to link your Profy blog to your own domain and post to this domain from Profy directly. Imagine you keep all your blogging tasks in one browser tab? And you will still be able to use your domain – and use the advanced AJAX interface on Profy to write your blog.
So I hope you will see more value in Profy for yourself in the future.

Today I want to discuss some thoughts that I have read in a blog post by one of our most passionate tester, Quiara – she had serious problems during registration and it took us almost a week to fix the problem with her account. But now that she is in here, she submits valuable feedback and suggests new features – some of them I would like to discuss here today.

• Desktop client/Dashboard widget/Firefox plug-in: The ability to update without being on the page is a fantastic feature, especially as Profy will, inevitably, become a blocked site on many work networks. (Yes, I admit it: I blog at work/school/wherever I happen to be. PROUDLY.) ^_^
• Ability to post via e-mail, for times when one is away from his/her own computer.  A registered e-mail address used to post is a valuable tool when on the road.  This opens up posting options from WAP phones as well as shared computers.

Since we actually target Profy at the users that can’t live an hour without updating their blogs with something invariably extremely important, we are definitely going to provide them with the tools to make updating blogs easier.

In the nearest plans we have a broser toolbar both for Firefox and Internet Explorer that will enable you to update your blog with something you see online, to access your latest comments and your network easily. If you have other ideas for the functionality such a toolbar should provide to you as a user, go ahead and share them in the comments below so that we could include them in development as well.

Later on we will also create desktop client and we will enable users to update their blogs by sending blog posts by email as well – but these features are in the medium-term plans so it will take longer time for them to be implemented.

• Ability to cross-post/ship posts to other blog sites. This is a useful feature for those of us who have developed friend/reader bases on other sites, not all of whom will follow us to Profy. Utterz, Twitter, Vox, LJ, Facebook, Blogger, etc., already allow for this and make it easy.

We understand that bringing to Profy bloggers with established blogs and readership from other platforms is a challenge that requires cross-posting, of course. We do not expect that people will simply leave their other blogs for good and migrate here without hesitation, of course. But we know that Profy provides functionality that is non-existent on other blog platforms, like reading feeds and networking with readers and other bloggers easily. So what we intend to do is make it possible for people to perform all their blogging activities here (for example, they can read news and create posts here) and cross-post their creations to their other blogs. Actually this is a high-priority feature for us that will be implemented very soon – we understand that growing the platform depends very much on how we allow people to work with other tools.

• Greater integration with photohosting sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, ImageShack, etc.

Integration at least with Flickr and Photobucket is to be implemented soon as well. The integration will allow your blog to access your account on Flickr or Photobucket and be able to easier choose the photo you need from there with thumbnails instead of using URL for every image you want to be displayed in the post.

We are also working on the solutions that will allow for media storage right within your own accounts for your photos and other files – but this is a very complex problem that requires proper research so this will take longer to implement,

I really enjoy what I've seen so far.  As has been pointed out to me, though, some of the layouts could use some rethinking in their color schemes.  Some of the fonts make for hard-to-read comment sections, both in the comment section itself and in the comment feed in the sidebar. (Also, names for the layouts would be useful when referring to them for trouble shooting. Much more useful than "that purple one" or "the one with rocks.")

Thank you for reporting this and for suggesting to name the features. I will have one of our developers go through the layouts again to make sure the fonts are easy to read on all the blogs. You are such a valuable user, thank you for bringing these important things to our attention.

If any of the users reading this post has some other bugs to report or features to suggest, feel free to leave comments below (as well as send emails to feedback@profy.com) so that I could bring your suggestions to attention of all the users here.

  

I have read a post by Ronald De Leon in which he described his initial Profy experience with a great humor. And since he was talking to himself in the post, I decided I should join and turn this into some kind of a conversation:

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!