Hello Owlstowners!

I hope you are having a wonderful summer. Over the past few months, I've been working on a few new features to help you build and manage your academic websites. Here is a quick roundup of what's new.

Cheers, Ian

Academic Link Will Become Owlstown Profiles

I'm retiring Academic Link and turning it into Owlstown Profiles — one profile, living under your own site instead of a shared domain. Your public profile moves from a shared address (academic.link/einstein) to your own site's address (e.g., einstein.owlstown.net/profile), helping build your own site's brand.

A new Visual Text block

Writing shouldn't mean fighting with your formatting tools. I rolled out a new Visual Text block (Text V2) — with independent font sizing, per-paragraph alignment, and a toolbar that stays out of your way until you need it.

For more details, check out the blog post.

Introducing Site Members: Share Private Content with Your Research Group

Not everything you create is meant for the whole Internet. Lab notes, draft papers, internal resources, meeting materials — some content is for your group only. I recently introduced Owlstown Site Members, a new way to manage who belongs to your site and what they can access. Your site members can use their existing Owlstown accounts to access protected pages on your site.

Duplicate pages with one click

Starting from scratch is the slowest part of building out a site. I added the ability to duplicate content, so you don't have to rebuild that structure every time you want something similar.

Added support for Clicky Analytics

I added support for adding Clicky Analytics to Owlstown. Clicky Analytics is a privacy-friendly, lightweight analytics service that's much easier to set up than Google Analytics. With Clicky, you can get a quick view of your traffic.