Tuesday
Apr272010
D. ChewSquarespace Social Widgets Release
Some big news! Our social widgets are now rolling live for our customers. The widgets are now running on our live servers and a group of commando testers have been trying their best to break them over the past few weeks. I'll admit we spent about a week or two longer than I would have hoped on this, but I hope it's worth the wait. The dust has settled and we're pretty confident they're in good shape.
- Flickr, Twitter, and RSS (Initially!). The Squarespace social widgets are a bridge to popular external services. Normally when embedding 3rd party services like Flickr, Twitter, etc. to your site, your site load times will be dramatically slowed down as your content is loaded from these services around the web. Squarespace Social Widgets pre-fetch your data from these services and merge the configuration into your already familiar Squarespace control panel --while keeping the widget look and feel appropriate for your Squarespace site. We'll be expanding to more services after our core set has settled in (next on the list are Digg and Delicious).
- Visual Presets. Squarespace has a number of excellent templates, but we've never provided visual presets for individual components on a site. Social widgets includes a style selector within the widget itself to let you control how you want your social data displayed.
- Style Mode Integration. Social widgets include full integration with the fonts, colors, and style configuration panel so you can tweak the widgets any way you want. I've definitely never seen a social widget this customizable before!
- MongoDB. This phenomenal document store, used by the likes of gilt.com and nytimes.com, is powering the back end. We know you've got a lot of social data out there and we're pulling your data feeds in and storing it on our servers. Thus, you won't be subject to the notoriously variable load speeds and downtime for all of the social services you're dealing with.
As always with any new feature, there may be some kinks to iron out. Feel free to open a ticket if you see anything strange. We have an exciting May planned, so stay tuned!
Reader Comments (54)
I can't wait to get home and load these on my site. I guess I'll have to start using Flicker again!
Looks great guys - slick design and great functionality as always.
Congratulations on the birth of your latest widgets :) Hoping to find some time today to integrate with Coco Paperie. Thanks!
Huge props for the whole Squarespace team... these widgets totally kick ass. They're fast and super easy to style... one of these bad boys can be enabled and customized without leaving your site in literally minutes.
Way. To. Go. Sq!
How often does the RSS Widget update feed content? It seems like a potentially awesome tool to replace a lot of the existing widgets (i.e. Journal Archive, Change Tracker, etc), not to mention to be used for creating a magazine style summary home page. For example, the Journal Archive widget can't filter by a specific category right now, yet you can easily do this with the RSS Widget by using a category feed.
Or are you still working on something else that integrates / merges local SQ content easily in real time (i.e. Summary Module)?
Looks great and the video is very nice as well. What a well designed solution, better than the other alternatives I have considered. I look forward to incorporating it in my sites
Love the Twitter widget! I hope Facebook comes soon. What about Gowalla/Foursquare?
Nollind: Around 15 minutes. We'll be launching a dashboard to check sync status. We have a series of summary widgets planned that do what you're saying in a much faster fashion. The idea for the summary set of components will be to have any "deep" content queryable (so, galleries and discussions as well as blogs). The current update stream widget isn't flexible enough.
Blake: This is just a start. With the infrastructure in place (the hard part), it's easy for us to add more. Facebook is tough in that their APIs are rough. You'll see us integrating the Facebook like system (as well as retweets etc.) in May as first level citizens to the blogging component.
Thanks and congrats! Great promo video, too.
Around 15 minutes.
Cool. That's actually not that bad when you compare other feed services that take hours to update. So it's decent enough to tie people over until these other widgets and modules come out later. Thx.
Congratulations! They look great and are SO EASY to configure and style. Thank you!
Very great job! In SS style, as always.
Just a note: please, be fast with Facebook and YouTube (that are the biggest social site to integrate, in fact)
thanks,
vlm
Very nice. I've had to use feed2js in an html widget for lots of RSS feeds in the past. I've already started replacing these. It takes about 3 minutes to replace each one!
Also appreciate this being rolled out as part of the current v5 of SQS. Thanks!
MikeT
LinkedIn would be good too
Bless you guys for getting this done finally. Godspeed on the rest of it. I'm not really religious, but it emphasizes the zeal I have for SS. I'm patient, but please, oh please step up the improvements. I have faith, but I hope this is a new sign from SS.
And strongly seconding LinkedIn.
We run an industry community site with you and this is important for many users I'm sure of it.
Keep it coming. More power to you guys!
I'm having difficulty getting the social widgets to show up on custom URLs. So, for example, example.squarespace.com works, but custom domain example.com shows just blank spaces. Anyone else experiencing this problem?
Hi AO: I did a quick check and it seems like importing RSS feeds via custom domains still work system wide. This might be a feed issue with the particular site you're importing. I'm looking through our system right now to make we didn't miss anything obvious. If the problem persists, please open a detailed support ticket with us so that we can track this particular problem and come up with any workarounds in a timely manner.
Thanks!
Thanks for the customizable Twitter widget. I added it to my blog, and it works great!
This is why Squarespace continues to be the blog/CMS of choice for me. You guys don't do anything halfway. It's a thorough and flexible imagining of functionality that falls flat on so many other platforms. When I was on Drupal, Twitter integration KILLED my load time. You guys knew this and went through great efforts to provide a solution that didn't create new problems. Kudos, bravo, and keep putting my monthly subscription fee to such great use.
I love this but not sure if I will use it or not. I really like the friendfeed widget because I send send all of my activity to that one place and it show pics and videos inline. Any thoughts of an uber widget that will do something like that. I have it on my site if that does not make sense. I have also added yours for the time being.
Is there planned integration for deviantart? That might possibly be the coolest thing ever. noticed the icon in your font page image.
Killer! This is awesome guys. Great Job as always!
CONGRATULATIONS! :)
The Twitter widget is great and I've installed it on my site. Tried the Flickr widget and not as good. It' only shows your most recent photos and not a random selection(which I would prefer) Also the slide show photos look pixelated for some reason. I think I'll stick with my custom Flickr integration.
How do you find / add the widget? I can't see it anywhere; is it available to all or is it still being rolled out?