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.

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).