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 corporate 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!