Thanks Twitter (no matter how much time it is down it still helps me track many interesting things people say about Profy) I have just stumbled at a great post by Hank Williams titled Disqus And Profy – First Step To Totally Portable Blogging. And this pretty humorous post made me realize one thing: with the existing blogging tools bloggers often feel like they are in jail.

Why? It’s simple: because the existing platforms do not allow bloggers actually handle their content like their own. And Hank actually mentions Profy as one of the two things that will help the bloggers get out of the jail.

So I wanted to write the post here to actually confirm that yes, we are really planning to help you do all the things related to your blogging activities in one place, no matter what tools they currently use. The first step in this direction from us is crossposting to other blogging platforms that I recently described in detail on this blog. But in addition to enabling you publish from here to as many blogs as you want to, we are definitely going to enable you to import all the content from your existing blogs to Profy (and eventually export should you want to move anywhere else, obviously).

Unfortunately, we are unable to roll out everything we want so much to do right now so it will take some time to implement. But the good part about Profy is that it is so new that it depends on our bloggers where exactly we will take the platform. We are building the platform for you so remember, we listen when you ask for something – like in this particular case. We used to guess that some people may need such functionality, but now we are sure – and we will make it real.

UPDATE: The post has just been published on Silicon Alley Insider so feel free to join the discussion there as well.

Over the last week I’ve been trying hard to understand how exactly Wikipedia works in terms of having an entry for your company there. What is absolutely clear from the community guidelines is that you are not supposed to create or edit an entry for yourself or your company. But it is obvious that by sitting and waiting for someone to write a special entry about your entry you will hardly ever get one!

So I decided that I would publish a small post here inviting all the Profy bloggers to participate in creating a page for Profy on Wikipedia (this is the initial link that takes you to writing a new page named “Profy”). After all, if you like the platform, chances are some other people will be happy to discover Profy through one of the relevant Wikipedia pages and more people will be blogging here. And we all know that Profy is definitely more fun with more bloggers here.

So if you feel like giving Profy some help on Wikipedia, feel free to use the materials in our About page as sources. And obviously, I will be happy to provide any additional information on the Profy platform should you need any. I will appreciate any help from our users we could get for Profy so thank you in advance!

Today I’m going to speak about a functionality of Profy that some of our users may not be aware of since it is not really accentuated via your dashboard – the crossposting. This functionality is useful for those bloggers that already have a blog (or blogs) on Google’s Blogger.com or Livejournal and do not want to abandon those blogs only because they like Profy interface better.

The functionality has already found a few fans and an example of successful implementation has been given by Louis Gray on his Blogger-powered blog. For many heavy bloggers this feature is very appealing because it allows them to update their multiple blogs simultaneously from the Profy platform – once all the blogs you want to update with the posts written on Profy are linked to your Profy account, all the published posts are sent to all those blogs you chose to crosspost to.

In this post I am going to provide you a step-by-step guide on how to configure crossposting from Profy to other accounts. And since we fully realize that this is a pretty simplistic implementation of crossposting, I would like to invite everyone to participate in a small poll in the end of the post so that we realized what is needed the most by our users or leave your comments to the post with your suggestions.

So, where do you start once you decide to use crossposting from Profy to other blogging platforms?

First, you will need to go to the ‘Blog’ section of the platform and choose the tab ‘Settings’. In this tab you will find a pane called ‘Crossposting’:

To start adding new blogs for crossposting, simply click the ‘Link to a new blog’ button:

This will open a dialogue where you will have to choose the platform that you want to send your posts to. Currently Profy only supports crossposting to Blogger.com and LiveJournal but we will be adding more platforms in the future.

I will show here the process of linking a Google’s Blogger blog to my Profy account below. To start, you will need to choose Blogger from the list of platforms and this will take you to the next step:

In this step you will need to choose a title for your blog (this title does not affect your Blogger blog – it is only intended for you to easily recognize the linked blogs) and choose if you want Profy to crosspost to this linked blog by checking in the “Enable crossposting to this blog” field. Remember, before you are able to crosspost anything anywhere, you will need to authorize Profy to do so by proving that these blogs are actually owned by you.

To authorize your Profy account for crossposting, you will need to click the word “here” in the “Click here to authorize your account”:

Don’t forget that you will need to authorize Profy to Google in order to be able to send your posts from Profy to Blogger (sorry it is in Russian, Google constantly refuses to apply my setting of English as my language to all their sites).

Once you authorize Profy, you will be able to choose the blogs from your Google blogs that you want to crosspost from Profy by checking their respective check boxes:

Once you are done selecting the blogs you want to update from Profy, click Ok to complete the process.

Now that you have completed linking the blog (or blogs) from one of the blogging platforms, you will have those linked blogs listed in the ‘Crossposting’ pane of the ‘Settings’ tab:

For any blog from the list you will always be able to disable crossposting if you want to suspend publication of posts created by you on Profy or enable crossposting again for disabled blogs. Or you can also delete the blogs you do not intend to use in conjunction with Profy any more.

You are now done, once everything is set up and crossposting is enabled, you will see your new posts appear both on your other linked blogs as well.

And now the small poll that I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this post. Your answers will really help us understand where exactly we should take crossposting from here on:

Poll Answers

Thank you for taking the poll and happy blogging!

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.