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.

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…