Towards the end of beta: Patapage 1.0 release
The date when Patapage 1.0 will go online is set: we set a target to go online with 1.0 on the 29 of April (2010 
).
We have fixed the set of features that should be ready by that date, among which:
- commentable contents, which is a convoluted way of defining a blog’s functionality
- we completely redesigned the interface for creating scripts for your site – which you see in the picture
- have “meta” scripts – for example that generate lists of contents
- all labels be customizable
- enable the “buy” functionality
- prepare a user guide
This is the current opening of the user guide:
Using Patapage is a completely new way to add functionality to web sites, in a way where you are keeping control. You can add functionality one piece at a time, never bringing down your site, without breaking your design.
Patapage will be loved by people frustrated by CMS. Patapage will be loved by people that put design at the center of web development. Patapage will be loved by people that want simple solutions. Your site can keep evolving, can keep collecting and interacting with all the information sources out there without becoming a complex application. It will remain a simple set of HTML pages.
Patapage is not a universal tool, and intentionally so. The core of the buildup of the site is done with your own tools, with your preferred simple HTML editor.
Patapage is the fastest way to integrate your site with services which you normally obtain with painful server side coding.
Add a nice, light music player to your pages
We just published an additional button / link creator in Patapage that lets you add a music player on your site:
It handles both single files and playlists. To set the files to be played, it has a comfortable edit in place:
This way you can publish your podcasts, music files, any mp3 file in the context of your site. Easy to set and to maintain, as all Patapage
A demo page is here.
Thanks to Happyworm and their jPlayer that has made this integration much easier than it could have been.
Bringing a static site to life with Patapage
We have just published a demo site for Patapage here:
In these web pages you can see the evolution of a web site from a designed draft:
to a complete site with rich functionalities:
One of the great things about building the Patapage demo is that even the documentation concerning the demo is built with Patapage:
Now that we’ve shown how easy it has become to build a beautiful, update and interactive site, it is your turn!
Get Patapage service for free
Today we update our pricing policy, adding clauses for getting the Patapage service for free. From the pricing page:
To get a FREE year of Patapage service (on a single site profile), renewable, you can do one of the following:
* If you want to use Patapage on a web site of a do-gooder of any sort (non-profit, charity, open-source contributor, you get the idea), email us from an e-mail of that site. See below for review details. …
* If you are using Patapage on a web site and are willing to let us use it in our showcase, send us a link to the site. See below for review details. …
* If you are a long time blogger / journalist and wrote a public review of Patapage, send us a link to the review. See below for review details. …
IMPORTANT: Review details. We’ll review your application, and we may or not grant you the license; whether you satisfy the requirements above is only for us to judge. You will hear back for sure only in case of positive answer. We try our best, but please be understanding if you don’t hear back from us.
On the pricing page you can apply for the free service.
Birth of web site community management
In the progress towards the end of beta, we published the first version of community management in Patapage.
As Patapage keeps track of users posting comments and contributing contents, you have the list of users available with their personal data:
You can moderate and contact users, and group their contributions. This will eventually open the possibility of having a user reputation system, say like the system used in the stackoverflow family of sites, which could lead to operations possible on the base of reputation.
Another step towards the design quality and usability of mashups – and the services of a CMS!
Customization of Patapage windows
We just released further options in the customization of “windows” (actually, divs) opened by Patapage links and buttons on your site.
Now the mashupped contents can be surrounded by custom headers and footers. You can also set a global header and footer for your entire site – notice that with the same Patapage account you can manage multiple sites.
An example page is here: http://patapage.com/demo/layout.jsp
If you log in, it will be possible to edit headers and footers contextually:
Any HTML contents can be put there, images and so on:
Global headers and footers for your site’ Patapage windows will be configured from the backoffice:
This is an example of the advantages of using mashupped contents in an environment where you have a web site profile and a state – the advantages you traditionally got only by switching to a CMS.
What a delicious site
Patapage has just been updated with a new functionality: a delicious filtering window, as shown in this demo page:
http://patapage.com/demo/delicious.jsp
Delicious is a very well-known and very simple online service for bookmark sharing, which can be used for all sorts of bookmarking. An example usage is in this blog post, Tracking your Company’s Mentions with Del.icio.us.
With Patapage integrating your site or page relative bookmarks with and in your site will be a matter of minutes (at most), with all the contextualization and control that Patapage allows.
Any of the delicious generated feeds, as documented here on Delicious site, can be used to create or expand an existing page with Patapage. This way several people can share links relative to contents on your pages, contributing new sources of information.
Almost a press kit – Patapage January 13 press release
Below you find a press release which includes links to screenshots which may be useful if you want to write something about Patapage.
Title
Patapage Beta Shows How To Build Sites Using Mashups In A Designer Friendly Way
Subtitle
Patapage, A New Online Service For Site Designers And Developers Is Now Available In Beta: It Is A Mashup Service That Can Change The Way Web Sites Are Built And Extended.
Body
Florence, Italy – January 11, 2010. Open Lab, a Florentine software house, released the beta of a new online service for all web site builders, called Patapage, available at http://patapage.com. Web mashups have been used for quite some time for adding widgets on web sites: with Patapage you can start building and expanding web sites using just the “paste a line of script” technique familiar from web widgets. Patapage provides widgets with a custom, uniform layout and profiled site contents.
With Patapage an existing web site can be expanded in minutes adding contributed wiki-style contents, page-relative comment feedback, image galleries, contact forms, rating, retweet, Google, Twitter or Delicious custom searches, windows on other websites, annotated feedbacks, and much more. This way the site content can be enriched with additional information sources, some of which will auto update.
Technically speaking, a Patapage account lets you extend mashup techniques with profiled server side contents, enabling statistics, community management and security.
While mashups and web widgets support the latest interaction techniques, they loosen control of the user / web site interaction, and also make it problematical to keep a consistent design. Patapage solves both these problems, by providing an environment for embedding mashup and customization of additional layout. Patapage uses the jQuery components techniques developed by Matteo Bicocchi on the Pupunzi web site http://pupunzi.com , which are widely used by JavaScript developers and web site builders. With Patapage those JavaScript techniques get supported with data and persistence of a site specific account, resulting in a service with the power of a traditional Content Management System and the dynamics of mashup services.
To learn more about Patapage, see the web site http://patapage.com. There you can test Patapage on any web site, even without enrolling.
Patapage’ screenshots are available on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/open-lab/sets/72157623166770460/
Follow Patapage developments: blog – twitter stream
Post about Patapage on Twitter: post to Twitter
Submit/vote feature requests: http://patapage.uservoice.com
To be notified when Patapage will be out of beta:
http://patapage.com/applications/pataPage/site/subscribe.jsp
###
Media contact
Pietro Polsinelli
E-mail: ppolsinelli@open-lab.com
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/ppolsinelli
Blog: http://pietro.open-lab.com
About
Patapage is produced by Open Lab, a software house established in 2001 in Florence, Italy.
Open Lab
Via Venezia 18b
50121 Florence – Italy
http://www.open-lab.com
Phone: +39 055 5522779
Flip your HTML text around
One of the problems we had to met while building Patapage was the ability of “flipping” text vertically in both directions, top-bottom and bottom-top. This because many users want to activate Patapage services as docked buttons, as it is done in so many web 2.0 applications, adding some external application widget to your pages.
But in those cases the text pasted is fixed, and the widget’s button is usually an image, with “on click” active on it. But we wanted more: we wanted the web site editor to be capable of freely editing the text of the button, so we needed the docked button to be in pure DHTML. We needed to be able to flip any text vertically, either bottom up or top bottom.
We thought there would be a hundred ready (possibly on jQuery) solutions to this, but we found none, in particular, none compatible with the usual series IE7-8 Firefox Safari Chrome, so our pupunzi built his own; it is a general jQuery component, freely available here:
http://pupunzi.open-lab.com/mb-jquery-components/mb-fliptext/
And then we included this feature in Patapage, if you are using docked buttons:
How to customize a Patapage button
In the Patapage demo we present functionalities through docked buttons; this is a way to make them visible, but it is not necessarily so: services may be activated by clicking any kind of link – actually, they may even be activated when the page simply loads (this will also be an option in a Patapage upgrade we are preparing). In this post we’ll see how to create custom links activating patapage.
The Patapage buttons can be drawn at least in two ways:
- As docked buttons
- As inline links
1. As docked buttons
The docked button is the default and it will appear vertically on the left side of the page; this is injected by the Patapage script itself (one for each functionality you paste into the page body); in this case you can customize the label and the color of each docked button.
2. As inline links
This option will add a link tag to the Patapage generated code; you can manage and adapt its appearance to your page design. For example you can put the link into your menu bar, or you can have a clickable image instead of a textual link, or you can add your custom CSS class, or you can apply any JavaScript effect to show and manipulate its appearance…
To make this clearer I’m going to explain how to customize a PataWiki button in your page:
1. Go to the back office of your Patapage account; choose PataWiki from the left bar:
2. Write your label and check the “button as simple textual link” check box:
3. Customize the appearance of the overlay and the screen window:
4. Generate the code and paste it into your page:
As you can see at the top of the pasted code there’s an <A> tag that you can place wherever you need on your page; for example you can move it to your page menu or inside your text, you can add special CSS classes or manipulate it via JavaScript. The only important thing is not to remove the ID, needed to attach the correct behavior to the click action.
Here is a screen of a custom Patapage button bar:
This is the code inserted for the menu:
Notice that there are four links referring to Patapage buttons (the one with the ID) and one pointing to an external link (“about me”). The patapage buttons action is defined in the part of the script you pasted at the bottom of your page.
You can see this example at: http://patapage.com/demo/indexIntegrated.jsp
