Diggnation Live in NYC!

Squarespace is thrilled to build on the excitement of our iPhone app release as one of the sponsors of tonight's Diggnation Live event!

Our friends Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht will be on hand, along with a huge crowd of crazy, lovable NYC geeks. The night will be filled with lots of high-flying surprises (that's a hint), and Squarespace tshirts!

We know that not everyone can make it to the actual event, but we wanted to make sure to keep you up-to-date with all the action--so we designed an awesome Squarespace site to help you do it!

Tune into Diggnationlive.squarespace.com throughout the day and evening to watch as we set up for the event, shadow the Squarespace girls, and enjoy the Live Diggnation show. Best of all, the site is entirely powered by our new Squarespace iPhone app, and will include posts, tweets and photos from our whole Squarespace team.

There's still time to RSVP if you'd like to come--hopefully we'll see a bunch of Squarespacers tonight!

The Squarespace iPhone App is Live!

After months of testing, re-testing, fine-tuning and development, the Squarespace iPhone App has finally been approved by both ourselves and Apple (no small feat!).  

The Squarespace iPhone app has a completely custom user interface we have developed in house that matches your Squarespace site's look and feel completely.  We've also developed the only iPhone application on any major publishing platform that contains a iPhone native statistics interface, tightly integrating your phone, your site, and your data.  The main features of the application include:

• Posting - Snap photos on your phone, and quickly post them to your blog!  Or easily draft blog posts directly from your "Post" tab -- all of your current tags and categories will be there.
• Content Management - All of your posts will be accessible directly from your "Manage" tab. You can edit drafts, delete posts and preview posts with ease.
• Multiple Account Management - Your "Accounts" tab allows you to manage content for multiple Squarespace sites. You can save a draft post for one site and then easily jump to another site to schedule a post for later in the day.
• Viewing Your Statistics - You can now view your Squarespace site statistics right from the application's statistics tab.  Unique visits, page views, popular search terms, RSS subscribers and top referrers are all included.
• Live Site Preview - Double check your work before you click "publish" with the app's "Preview" tab. 

 We've tried to include all the best features of Squarespace in our initial release.  So, download the app and let us know what you think! 

Note:  Due to the extremely long approval times Apple requires -- we are already well into the next version of this application.  In that version, you'll have comment management and approval as well as a number of other small refinements.  We know this is a big feature, and it's coming extremely soon.

Update on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 10:49AM by A. Casalena

1.0.4 RELEASE UPDATE:  Guys, we have a few known issues with this release that we've recorded and have fixed, but the app store is delaying our approval for 1.0.5 as usual, which we'd normally have fixed for you all immediately.  We know about:

• Passwords not being accepted that have special characters.
• Images sometimes being rotated imporperly after posting.
• Landscape view for editing entries.
• Stats labels for Robots/Uniques being incorrectly shown.

Thanks!  If you're experiencing something not on this list, feel free to write in! 

Celebrity Squarespacers

It's fun when we find out that some of our favorite celebrities are using Squarespace for their websites--like actor and comedian Kevin Pollak.

And the hilarious Jamie Kennedy.

Kevin Pollak's site uses a neat Flickr slideshow integration technique on the front page that almost makes it look the TV is changing channels! And Jamie Kennedy's site really pushes the envelope in terms of what's possible with the Squarespace platform.

We think both sites look great--what do you think?

Totally Rad Websites

We've just launched a brand-new, "totally rad" site for Revision3's Totally Rad Show. There's a lot of great customization in this one to enhance user interaction — click 'Post a Comment' on the blog page to see what I mean. ;)

Here's more new Squarespace sites on the scene you might want to check out:

• Film Riot, from the Revision3 family 
• ABC News Radio is using Squarespace to unite all of their podcasts 
• Alex Albrecht, of TRS, Diggnation and Project Lore — and,
• Fox News's Clayton Morrison also relaunched his Grizzly Bear Cafe podcast site.

What are some of your favorite Squarespace sites? Leave us a link in the comments!

Squarespace and the Environment

Squarespace has always had a positive relationship with the environment. Serving web pages is always going to be far more green than manufacturing paper, so we have that going for us. We recently sat down to do a review of our complete footprint and realized that we were so darn close to being carbon-balanced that we might as well go the rest of the way. And so, as of today, all of the electricity that we buy is Green-e certified renewable and we are TerraPass certified carbon-balanced. 

Take a look at our new environmental impact page for the details. We're really proud of what we've done with this and would love to hear your thoughts.

Release: The New Blog Importer

Data portability is always a critical feature with every major blogging platform. If you need to move your site, you need to have control over your content-- and that includes the ability to import and export your blog.

Squarespace has provided both importing options (from most popular formats) and exporting options (to Movable Type format) since day one, but there's always been an elephant in the room that nobody discusses when it comes to portability: when you move your site, these export files don't contain your media from your old posts. In other words, in most cases you'll have to keep your old site live so that images on your new site will work. Additionally, new systems almost always have different URL structures --meaning that links to your old posts will inevitably break when you move.

These are serious problems that we set out to solve. Which is why it's with great pleasure that I can finally announce our new importing tool. The new system will:

• Support more importing types - We realize that there are a variety of blogging platforms out there, so we engineered an Importer designed to work with all the major online blogging tools including: Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type. 
• Move ALL of your data over - After entering your login credentials, our Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. You will lose nothing.
• Crawl existing post media and rehost to Amazon S3 - Upon importing, Squarespace will crawl all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to our Amazon S3 account. That means you can safely cancel your old service without worrying about how to download your images and re-upload them (an impossible manual task). Further, this won't count against your Squarespace bandwidth bill at all, as this technology is on our next generation media platform that's built to scale (using S3!).
• Ensure URLs map over to Squarespace properly - For users with custom domains moving over, we actually use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts -- automatically. This ensures that when you move your domain over to us, in most cases, all links to your old posts will work, and nothing will break. Your PageRank will update seamlessly, and the move will have no impact on the SEO status you've taken so long to build.

As with all new features -- there will likely be kinks, but let us know right away and we'll get to the bottom of things. Enjoy!

New Template: Usonian

Introducing our newest template (with 4 styles): Usonian

Usonian was a term used by the late Frank Lloyd Wright to refer to his clean, efficient, beautiful architecture for the masses.

In the same way, this template provides a solid framework for nearly any website. It is a clean, professional base that just needs your personal or corparate branding.

A few highlights:

Full-Width Headers and Footers - background colors and banner images run seam-to-seam on the canvas for a really sharp effect.

Block-Style Sidebar Links - full-width links increase hit space and make for great looking hovers.

How do you get Usonian? It's already been added system-wide, just log in and browse the system templates [Style Editing Mode > Templates]...enjoy!

Did an interview on NPR about how Free isn't Free, a favorite topic, listen to 30 rambling minutes condensed to 4. http://bit.ly/1FbvAy

At Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 11:01AM

Twitter

Original

Inc. 500

We were honored to learn today that Squarespace has been included on the 2009 Inc. 500 list.

We are thrilled to be amongst a group of some of the most innovative and fastest-growing private companies in the United States. Our rank is #339 on the overall list, #32 on the IT Services list, and #23 on the NY Regional List.

Advanced Customizations

Since launching the new manual a few weeks ago, we noticed the need for more advanced walk-throughs on customizing modules.

Josh jumped on the case, and took to creating a bunch of working examples of our most requested customizations for the photo gallery and journal modules. These sites are live examples, with the exact configurations and CSS you'll need to achieve them. We plan on adding more of these for other modules in the future, to help people achieve some cool, more advanced things with their Squarespace sites.

If you feel like diving into some Custom CSS, jump on over and see the different options you can set up for your Squarespace site.

Journal Customizations

Photo Gallery Customizations