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!

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.