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!

Many of you have written in asking for a feature to allow you to create copies of panels. Well, you know what happens when you write in and ask for something! You can now duplicate sticky note, links and news feed panels by clicking ‘duplicate panel’ from the edit menu.

Sticky notes will also now automatically open in editing mode when you add them to your page, saving you a mouse click.

We’re making it easier for you to pack more information into your Protopage.

News feeds and email inbox previews will now automatically display in a smaller font. You can now also select ‘compact’ mode for your weather widget.

Please keep sending us your feedback – we’re listening!

You can now see a preview of your email inbox on your Protopage. The contents will automatically update every 5 minutes, unless you press the ‘check now’ button to force an immediate update.

This widget is compatible with Gmail, POP3 and IMAP mail providers. Unfortunately, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and other web-only email providers do not allow access unless you have a premium account with them – if you have such an account please follow their instructions for POP3 access and enter those details into the widget.

We have tested this widget with a number of email providers – please do write in if you have any particular troubles with your own email provider.

UPDATE:
Protopage will send your email password only once to our email indexing server – it does this only when you first register your inbox with Protopage. From then on – your email inbox is referenced by a special ID that is only valid if you are logged in to your Protopage. This prevents your password from being sent every time you load your Protopage, and as such protects you from someone using network security tools to see your password at a later date.

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.