This article is about the Proxi admin app at app.proxi.co.
Most communities already have their list of businesses somewhere — a members page on the website, a PDF brochure, a photo of the festival program, an email with fifty names in it. Read a List reads it for you. Paste text, drop a file, or give us a web address, and we pull out the places, find where they are, and show you the result to check before anything is saved.
Where to Find It
It's three of the shortcuts at the bottom of the Add Places dialog (and the Add Listings dialog on the Listings page): Extract From Text, Extract From a Website, and Extract From a PDF or Photo. While a list is still empty, those shortcuts are shown right on the page.
Giving Us the List
The dialog has three tabs:
Paste Text — names, addresses, whatever you have. A list copied out of an email or a spreadsheet works fine.
Photo or PDF — drop in PDFs, photos, or plain text files (up to about 15MB each, up to ten at a time). A photo of a printed program is a common one.
Website Address — type the site, like "yourdowntown.org." We read its directory and events pages, up to ten pages.
Fill in Your town or downtown underneath — it helps us place a "Rialto Coffee" in your Rialto and not one across the country. Then click Read It (or Read the Site). Reading can take a minute.
Checking What We Found
You get a list of places, each with a checkbox, and a note at the top — "We found a location for 18 of 20." For each row:
Found ones show the address we matched. If we found a possible match nearby, the row says so — worth a glance.
For any we couldn't place, click Find It to search by hand, or tick the row to add it without a spot on the map and fill the address in later.
Details we noticed — a phone number, a website, a category — are listed under "Here's what we noticed" and get added to each place. If a detail needs a new field, you'll be asked to confirm it.
Untick anything you don't want, then click Add N Places (or Create Fields and Add). Each one becomes a listing and a place, linked together.
Good to Know
Nothing is saved until you click Add. The review step is the whole point — you're the editor.
We place up to 25 rows per pass. For a longer list, the rest are marked and you can run Find It on them, or read the list in two batches.
It counts toward your plan. Each reading uses one of your monthly list readings, and each address lookup uses one place lookup. The amount of each is set by your subscription level, and the dialog shows how much room you have, and a Message Us button appears if you hit a limit — say hello and we'll sort it out.
Site reads are limited per hour. If you're bringing in several sites, pasting the list is the quicker route.
If a file is too big or in a format we can't read, we'll say so — PDFs, photos, and plain text files work.
Prefer a spreadsheet? Import a Spreadsheet is right next to these shortcuts. See Adding Places to Your Map.