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.

You can now embed web pages into your Protopage using the new web page widget.

Add the widget to your page by using the bottom toolbar, then click the edit button to enter the address of the web page you wish to embed (e.g. http://www.example.com).

You may optionally set a vertical offset or horizontal offset amount, which will hide the topmost and leftmost part of the web page displayed (which means you won’t have to scroll down to the interesting part of the embedded web page each time you load your Protopage).

A few notes:

• Some web pages (such as the Google Maps page) will automatically attempt to focus the text cursor in their search box when they load. This means that if the Google Maps page is located at the bottom of your page, then the page will automatically scroll down to the Google Maps widget when you load your Protopage. For this reason, you may find it more practical to add web sites like these to a page other than page 1 within your Protopage.
• Due to browser implementation specifics beyond our control, you may find that some Macromedia Flash animations always appear on top of all other content, even if they are supposed to be outside of the visible bounds of the web page widget.
• You might also see some interesting effects in Firefox temporarily while you are scrolling or dragging the web page widget. Unfortunately, the issues listed above are outside of our control.

Please also note that for best results, if you are using an older installation of Firefox it is preferable if you upgrade to the latest version (1.5).

Possible uses of this widget include embedding search engine pages, maps, web cams, sports scores… please do leave a comment if you think of a cool use for this widget that you’d like to share!

We will be upgrading our servers on Sunday in order to handle extra traffic and to make your pages load faster.

We estimate that Protopage will be out of service for up to 45 minutes during this upgrade. We have chosen the time that the fewest users are online, which is Sunday morning.

The upgrade times are as follows:

Note that Protopage has a feature called ‘smart save’. What this means is that if you lose your connection to the internet or if the Protopage server is unavailable for any reason, your browser will warn you after making changes to your page. Your browser will then retain the change (as long as you do not close it), and give you an option to try saving the changes again.

This is an important feature which means that your valuable changes are never lost if your internet connection goes down, and even means you can work on your page while disconnected and save your changes back to our servers once you plug your machine back into an internet connection.

UPDATE: The data center upgrades have been successfully completed.

Protopage now supports two ‘widget positioning’ modes: Free positioning and Gravity.

Free positioning, which Protopage has had since launch, means that you can position widgets anywhere on the screen, and even allow widgets to overlap.

Gravity is a new positioning mode which will help you tidy up your page if you have a lot of widgets. Gravity does not allow widgets to overlap, and will automatically move a widget upward if there is free space above it.

The diagram above explains this – but the best way to understand it is to try it!

To switch between free positioning and gravity modes, choose Colors / Settings from the bottom toolbar, and you’ll see the widget positioning options.

You can now upload as many photos as you want to your Protopage.

Images will automatically be resized to the size of the photo widget – this reduces the size of the photos to ensure that your page loads quickly.

To upload an image, go to the toolbar, choose ‘Add widget’, and then choose ‘Add photo’. Then follow the instructions within the widget.

We have also released a new ‘Leaf floating in pond’ wallpaper (as seen in the screenshot above). You can use this new wallpaper on your own Protopage by using the ‘Colors / Settings’ button on the toolbar at the bottom of your page.

Thank you for all of the search engine suggestions – they have been very helpful in putting together the new search widget (coming soon).

We’re currently working on a new and more colorful search widget – and it’ll give you the option to choose your favorite search engines to appear in the list (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Dictionary.com, Ebay, IMDB…). Please tell us what your favorites are, so that we can make sure as many of them as possible are included in the widget…

If you have a Gmail inbox preview widget on your Protopage, you may notice that it has been displaying a message:

‘There has been a problem connecting to your email server with the details you have given. Please check with your email service provider for the correct details.’

Google appear to be having network problems – which is why your email inbox previews are not working. Depending on your Internet Service Provider, you may or may not currently be able to access the site directly at http://gmail.google.com

This seems to be an issue affecting some parts of the internet and not others. We hope that access to Gmail from our servers will work again soon. We’ll keep you posted – and thanks to everyone that has written in about this.

UPDATE: Gmail is now working again.

UPDATE (17 May 2006) : Clocklink have modified the way their source code works, and are now using code that is incompatible with Protopage. We will post a message here when we have implemented a work-around.

As you’ve previously seen in our video tutorial, it’s possible to put all sorts of content into HTML sticky notes.

A website called ClockLink provides some fantastic clocks that you can use on your Protopage.

To get started, go to the ClockLink gallery and find a clock that you like.

Once you have decided on a clock, click the View HTML Tag button underneath it.

Choose your timezone and the size of the clock from the menus, and then copy the source code for that clock to the clipboard by selecting it, right clicking it and choosing Copy.

Now, go back to your Protopage, add a sticky note, and choose HTML at the bottom of the edit window. Now right click in the edit window and choose Paste.

Click Save Changes and you’re all done!