Squarespace Dethrones WordPress On iPhone

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After initially exposing the world to their iPhone app, it looks like the boys and girls at Squarespace have released an update that will make WordPress fans jealous.

While the Squarespace iPhone app already allowed users to view their blog’s stats, the team decided to go one step further in order to make the iPhone app truely useful for those blogging on the go.

Comment Moderation. This has been a very long time coming, but hey, anything worth doing is worth doing well, right? Moderate existing comments, reply to comments, approve comments, mark comments as spam, and email comment authors directly from the app.

Push Notifications. Yes, this is technically part of comments, but it deserves its own bullet. New comments and/or comments awaiting moderation will now send a push notification to your device. New comments will also pop a pretty badge onto the app’s icon if you ignore the push notification. (Official Squarespace Blog)

Note: Emphasis theirs.

Other features mentioned include various improvements when editing a post, as well as the ability to (finally!) create a blog post in landscape mode. The video below displays Squarespace’s comment moderation in action, which is similar to WordPress’s iPhone app. [Read more…]

Squarespace To Blogosphere: Are You Ready For The “Next Great Leap?”

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Squarespace has just announced  that the company has just added $38 million to their war chest which they will use to hire more engineers, expand their location and help improve their (already) impressive service.

While news of the investment will probably make waves in the startup world, what’s interesting are the “secret” plans Squarespace has for their service, which might help convince a few users to defect to the dark side.

This investment — a growth stage investment on top of an already successful business — will allow us to more rapidly produce the sort of products we want to make, and focus on getting those products to market.   This investment will support our product, team, and geographical expansion initiatives. […]

Squarespace customers will be the real beneficiaries of this transaction.  We want to grow into the company that can deliver the next stage of our vision — and I wanted to ensure nothing stood in the way of that.  We are now cleared of all obstacles that stand in the way of us building our next generation platform — which will emerge over the coming months. (Official Squarespace Blog)

Note: Emphasis mine. [Read more…]

WooThemes And Squarespace Team Up To “Kill The Spill”

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With BP’s enormous oil spill threatening wildlife around as well as within the gulf of Mexico, several companies have decided to partner with each other in order to save animals smothered in oil.

In the past couple of weeks, the world has been hit by the devastating news of BP’s oil spill in the Mexican Gulf. Whilst this hasn’t affected a lot of us directly (just as a result of our geographical locations), we can all agree that this is a massive man-made disaster that needs to be fixed. […]

So we’ve teamed up with 3 amazing companies –MetaLab, Squarespace & CampaignMonitor – to assist with the restoration of wildlife in the area: Kill The Spill is a new initiative from the 3 companies and it hopes to generate funds that will be donated to the National Wildlife Foundation. (Official WooThemes Blog)

Other companies like Micrsoft’s Bing are making similar attempts to help animals affected by the spill, although none of these companies are temporarily changing their backgrounds to “BP black” like Tumblr. [Read more…]

Squarespace Courts iPad, Ponders Android App

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After flirting with the idea of an iPad app, it looks as if the boys and girls at Squarespace have finally decided to develop an official app upon Steve Jobs “greatest creation.”

As far as Android goes however, the company is still giving the standard “we’re thinking about it” reply.

iPad App: This is a big one, and we get a lot of requests for it. The app is in development right now, but we don’t have a solid date for you. Once we have something more concrete, we’ll share.

Android App: Another big one. This one isn’t quite on the roadmap just yet, but we see a lot of support for it, so we’re kicking the idea around and determining how best to get our look and feel onto this platform as we have on the iPhone. (Official Squarespace Blog) [Read more…]

Squarespace Receives Love From Outbrain

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Outbrain (a company designed to help readers find relevant and related posts upon a blog) has announced that they are now providing support for the Squarespace platform.

We’re happy to announce that we have launched widget support for the Squarespace platform. This release makes it easy for anyone using Squarespace to easily add the Outbrain widget to their blog simply by going to the Get Widget page, choosing the type of widget you’d like to add and clicking on the Squarespace button. From there, you simply add the code to your blog by following a few easy steps. (Official Outbrain Blog)

Previously Squarespace fans had to install the Outbrain script manually (not to mention half blind), a feat only a true geek would attempt.

Now Outbrain provides steps for users to install the script upon their own blogs, which should help make Squarespace more competitive against rivals (like Blogger and Typepad).

This should also present Squarespace users another opportunity to generate revenue via Outbrain’s recommendation ad widget (which is currently available only to blogs with a large amount of traffic).