Please note that you can click the ‘twister’ to reveal more categories. This seems to be the most common reason for not being able to find tabs imported from your old Protopage.

We’re also getting feedback in from people who have accidentally deleted tabs. We thought this might happen, so we took precautions. Any widgets lost due to tabs being removed can be ‘undeleted’ - we’re working on the user interface for this now.

Some of you have also had trouble finding panels that you had kept in the old ‘widget dock’ - these should have been migrated into your page under a new tab. Please let us know if you have any trouble locating them.

We’ve also had a lot of requests to turn off the icons next to bookmarks - we’re working on that too.

You may find that your old color scheme isn’t as suited to V3 as it was to the old version of Protopage. You can make your page look like the screenshots on this blog by clicking ‘Colors and Settings’ and then ‘Load defaults’.

Please do write in and let us know if you have any problems with the migration of your page to V3 - you can contact us at our feedback form here.

UPDATE: We’re working on our first mini maintenance release now. We’ll post again today.

UPDATE 2: We’ve made 9 mini maintenance releases in the last 48 hours - thank you for reporting bugs and please continue to do so here. We are still working on undelete / migration issues and will post again soon. All data is backed up so all issues should be resolved.

Welcome to Protopage V3. An enormous THANK YOU to our loyal users and to everyone that has written in with comments, suggestions and bug reports - your support and feedback continues to be critical in shaping the future of Protopage.

We’re pleased to announce the following brand new features:

The new feed reader auto-detects feeds which only provide headlines and summaries, and displays them in an “article summaries” mode (try it for a feed such as CNN.com). It also uniqely remembers and orders your news feeds according to the frequency with which you read them.

Cartoon mode: see the largest image from any particular feed as a single image, which is perfect for cartoon news feeds.

Thumbnail mode: see thumbnail grids of not only Flickr/photo feeds, but of any news feed.

Video podcast support

Audio podcast support, with integrated podcast player

You can now organize your page by creating tabs and categories. If you want to use Protopage as a quick and easy web page publishing tool, you can make your tabs public so that the whole world can see them. You can also assign passwords to groups of tabs so that only certain people will be able to view or edit them.

A hierarchical todo list, with edit-in-place and drag-and-drop - not only within lists but between different todo list widgets.

Protopage launches with 270 preloaded widgets, including 96 games, 71 finance widgets and 26 sports score widgets.

For developers: our integrated online widget showcase and development environment features revision control and source code diffs. There is a visual designer for the configuration forms of widgets, with template based attribute injection to enable configurable widgets to be created with no knowledge of Javascript or XML. We’d love for you to create your own widgets, share them with the users of Protopage, and hear back from your users on your widgets’ comment forms! You can sign up for our widget development system at http://widgets.protopage.com

It’s now easier than ever before to add new content and widgets to your Protopage. There are wizards for adding news feeds, podcasts, video podcasts, cartoon feeds and photo thumbnail feeds, as well as a directory of hundreds of news publications and blogs to choose from.

No more clicking the ‘edit’ button to change a sticky note! You can now simply click to edit the text directly inside the widget. (Note: This only works for our new plain-text sticky notes. If you use a Rich Text / HTML sticky note, you still need to use the ‘edit’ button so that you can use all of the Rich Text formatting control buttons and options).

For quick access to your favourite search engines, such as Wikipedia, you can use the new search box in the top right corner of your Protopage. You can choose from our directory of built in search engines, or add your own.

With the introduction of support for the Opera browser, you can now even view your Protopage on your Nintento Wii!

Mac users: we highly recommend you use the either the Firefox or Opera browser for the best Protopage experience.

Thank you for being a Protopage early adopter - and thank you again to everyone that has written in and supported us.

We’re now working on new features including the ability to export the contents of your Protopage. We record and tally feature requests sent in so that we can prioritize the introduction of new features according to demand.

Please continue to send us your comments, suggestions, bug reports and feedback so that we can continue to make Protopage everything you want it to be!

We’re now in mid “launch sequence”, and we will launch today (Monday 27th November). Accounts are being migrated to V3 as we speak. The image below is a taste of V3. We count 30 major new features.

See you on the other side.

Until recently, much of the design of Protopage has been in flux. There have been several major aspects of v3 that we have redesigned twice over after receiving feedback from test groups. We have also made the decision to extend the functionality beyond our original plans. Earlier timeline predictions required guesses as to how many design iterations we would have to complete in order to get Protopage just right. Now that we have locked down the design, the timeline is far more predictable.

We know that many of you have been keenly awaiting version 3 and we thank you for your patience. Because of the deep structural changes to the application, we’ve been forced to batch all of our new features into one ‘big bang’ release. After v3 goes live, we will resume our regular weekly blog postings and release new features week-by-week as soon as they are developed.

While we’re completing Protopage v3, we thought you might enjoy playing with our new mascot, Protopuppy! You can try Protopuppy and see full instructions for adding it to your page here:
http://www.protopage.com/protopuppy

If you have an RSS or ATOM news feed that requires a username and password, it will now work inside Protopage.

If it is not already, please ensure the feed URL is in the following format:

http://username:password@example.com

We will also support secure http (https://) feeds when version 3 is released.

So, how is version 3 going?

When we started working on v3 back in April, we had a roadmap of features for Protopage versions 3, 4 and 5. It became clear that in order to allow for the more ambitious features we have planned for future versions, we would have to create some common infrastructure that has significantly extended our v3 timeline.

With version 3 we’re going beyond expectations to create some powerful ways for you to organize and categorize your page content. We’re creating the means for you to extend Protopage and add your own functionality - so you’ll be able to customize your Protopage even more than ever before. The look and feel has also had a spring clean.

Thank you all for your patience - we hope that you’ll be as excited with version 3 as we are.

By the way, say hello to Protopuppy, our new mascot!

Protopage version 3.0 is getting closer!

We’ve been hard at work redesigning our interface so that you can do more with your Protopage than ever before (yes, tabbed pages and an API are on their way!). Much of our time has actually been spent designing features for version 4.0 and beyond - so our version 3.0 launch will be one of many to come.

We’re still some distance from launch, but in the mean time, here are the top five things you might not know about Protopage:

1. We keep all of your data on battery backed RAID 10 disk arrays. This means that our systems will continue to function at full speed and all of your data will be safe even if we lose half of the hard disks in our arrays. In case of an even greater disaster (you know, like asteroids), we also keep off-site rolling backups.

2. We always have at least one engineer monitoring the Protopage site 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year.

3. If you lose your internet connection while you are making changes to your Protopage, your changes are retained as long as you do not close your web browser. Protopage will automatically detect and warn you that your network connection was unavailable when you tried to make a change, and will give you an option to try saving your changes again when your internet connection resumes.

4. We have received 4,164 suggestions for new features. (Thank you!!! We’re very sorry we haven’t had the chance to reply to them individually, but we greatly appreciate every single one and we agonize over them during our product design sessions.)

5. Version 3.0 of Protopage will continue to be completely free.

Thank you all for your support and for the wonderful feedback you’ve been sending us. The future of Protopage will be a product of your collective imagination!

For those using Firefox to access Protopage - an important bug has been fixed in the latest Firefox 1.5.0.2 release.

This bug, which only affected Firefox users, caused news feeds to rapidly reload and very occasionally resulted in a browser crash.

We are very happy to inform you that Firefox have fixed this bug and we highly recommend that Firefox users now upgrade to version 1.5.0.2.

For more information on this bug, see this link: “window.setTimeout() goes crazy periodically - functions are immediately called repeatedly.”.

We’re currently working on an array of new features and improvements for version 3 of Protopage - including an update of the look and feel. Thank you all for the marvellous suggestions sent in so far - Protopage will continue to evolve until we’ve implemented every one of them!

Just a quick note to let you know that Gmail has been having problems with their RSS feeds, which power the Gmail inbox previews on Protopage.

Until Google fix this problem, there is a workaround. Google will allow you to access your Gmail via POP3 - and you can enable this feature by logging into your Gmail account and clicking the Settings button in the top right of the screen. Then select the Forwarding and POP tab, and in the POP Download section choose Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on. Then click the Save Changes button.

Now, add an inbox preview widget to your Protopage, and click the edit button. For inbox type, choose POP3 (instead of Gmail), and enter your login and password (for login, if you Gmail email is yourname@gmail.com, then just enter yourname as the login).

For the POP3 server address enter pop.gmail.com and tick the Server uses SSL box. Finally, enter http://mail.google.com/mail/ for the Webmail URL, click Save changes, and voila!

UPDATE: Gmail have restored their RSS feed service, so this workaround is no longer necessary.