Protopage has been successfully relocated and we’re now running on two additional processor cores. Now, back to work on new features… (Gmail / POP3 / IMAP support is imminent)

We will be moving the Protopage server cluster to a new, state-of-the-art data center on Sunday 12th February.

We are making this move because one of our core priorities is to provide you with excellent uptime so that you can rely on Protopage being there when you need it. We will also be adding hardware to increase our server cluster capacity.

We estimate that Protopage will be out of service for up to four hours during this move. We have chosen the time that the fewest users are online, which is Sunday morning.

The outage times are as follows:

We will be taking lengthy precautions to ensure that your data is kept safe during the transition (a combination of backups and our mirrored disk arrays). Thank you for bearing with us during this process.

Use the new widget button on the toolbar to add weather to your page. As always, use the edit button on the panel to choose your city! Expect more widgets, and send us your suggestions…

You can now overlap Protopage panels to your heart’s content.

You can also turn off shadows by clicking ‘Colors/Settings’ on the toolbar, and then unticking the ‘Enable panel shadows’ box.

We’ve just upgraded our RSS/Atom news feed indexer - this should solve the ‘We are currently indexing this feed. Please wait…‘ issue where custom feeds were taking some time to index. Feeds should now always complete their initial indexing within a few seconds.

We’ve made a few minor alterations to the color schemes with today’s maintenance release. You’ll notice the new ’stitching’ styling, along with color balancing that will make your Protopage look better when you combine panels of different colors on the same page. We’ve also made some assorted bug fixes including further improvements to the scrollbar functionality. Please continue to let us know about any bugs you’ve noticed and any features you’d like to see in the future.

You can put all sorts of custom content into your Protopage using the Edit as: HTML option in your sticky notes.

To see what is possible, take a look at our demo page.

To get started, go to YouTube.com and find a video clip you like (or upload your own).

Then, copy the code listed underneath the video in the box labelled ‘Embeddable Video’.

Now, add a new sticky note to your page, resize it so that it’s large enough to fit the video inside, and then click the edit button. Choose Edit as: HTML at the bottom of the text area, and paste in the code copied from the YouTube video clip page.

Click Save Changes, and you’re all done! If you make your page public, you can now even share the video clips on your Protopage with friends (hover over page numbers in the bottom right of your Protopage and click the padlock icons to make each numbered page public or private).

By popular demand, you can now hover your mouse over a news feed panel, and use the scroll wheel to scroll through the news headlines. Works in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Firefox users: you can open links in new tabs either by clicking the middle mouse button, or by clicking the left mouse button while holding the CTRL or CMD key.

Best wishes for 2006 from the Protopage Team. A flurry of new features are on their way!

Protopage will be adding more than a dozen new features over the next few months. Next up: photos.

Putting photos on your Protopage

You can already put your own pictures and wallpaper onto your Protopage by uploading them to an external image hosting service (instructions here).

In the next few weeks, we’ll be making this process much easier with a brand new Photo Widget, which will guide you through the process of choosing your photo, uploading it and resizing it to fit an area of your page.

Also coming soon: a new news feed indexing engine, which will allow you to add custom feeds that may previously have been troublesome.

We are developing and planning new features by holding focus groups with people that have written in. Please continue to tell us what you want to see - your detailed suggestions and bug reports are directly shaping the future of Protopage.