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.

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!

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:

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. 

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

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!

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. 

• 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.

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. 

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.

• 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”.

• 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.")

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.

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.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Profy Announces Alpha Launch of Its
One-Stop Web Platform for All Things Blogging

San Francisco, CA, January 9, 2008 -- With blogging
clearly here to stay and experts predicting continuing growth, Profy enters the
game today with the alpha launch of its new Web platform for bloggers. The
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.

Profy’s
vision is to provide single, comprehensive seamless access and friendly
navigation for the many stages of the blogging process – news reading, sharing
selected news stories with a group of readers, writing posts and publishing
them, discussing posts with readers, and communicating with readers on other
topics. In short, it wants to provide -- in one place -- all the creative tools
a blogger could want. Notable among the capabilities are an integrated
dashboard with full-featured reader making it easy for bloggers to follow
important events, an advanced WYSIWYG editor that turns the publishing process
into a snap, and social networking tools that allow authors to engage in
discussions with readers.

Today’s
launch kicks off private alpha testing of the platform with an initial set of
tools and applications allowing users to read and write blogs, discuss created
content, and network socially with readers and other blog