Squarespace blog/edu website

Hi All,

I’m thinking of consolidating websites into just one website for my research lab. I’m planning on keeping my domain with my name and have it redirect to my lab website. I was wondering if you all had some thoughts or advice on the following questions/thoughts?

I’ve come across conflicting information while googling. Does square space support publishing from 3rd party apps like Mars Edit and Ulysses?

How would you go about setting up a .edu address with square space? Does anyone have experience with this?

Hi, I have a Squarespace site as well. Unfortunately I don’t know of an external editor that will publish to Squarespace. They do have their own app for iOS that you can use and there is a browser shortcut to make a quick post to your site but Mars or Ulysses doesn’t work. I looked for something that would be similar to Mars Edit but couldn’t find anything.

For the .edu address, this goes back a bit but I’m pretty sure you need to obtain the domain from Educause (with whatever process they have) then you should be able to manage the domain and point it to Squarespace just like any other domain.

Thanks for the info. That’s too bad. I think I’m still going to switch. I decided I don’t want to spend time dealing with viruses and updates for my lab website.

I found out that edu domains are only for actual organizations. It’s not enough to be affiliated with a educational institution.

I personally find Squarespace very limited and overkill unlike what people are trying to say.

You can setup any TLD with them, but you can’t buy every tld from them.

I’d recommend Static Site Generator like Hugo.

FYI SquareSpace used to support posting through MarsEdit because it supported a standard API for posting. They broke this a few years ago and, despite assurances, have never brought it back.

I’ve used SquareSpace before but never really liked it. You have to buy in to their themes and not want to do a lot of customizing, I found their support staff lacking for anything except basic questions, and their iOS apps were terrible. I couldn’t even edit Markdown posts in the iOS apps most of the time. Markdown seemed like a “checkbox” feature that they implemented because they knew they had to, but didn’t really support very well.

It’s still where I would send lots of people who just want a website. But it’s not a site for power users, imo.

I create websites using Squarespace for my clients. It does not support any third-party apps for blog publishing. (This is a feature, not a drawback, for my clients. For my own sites, I wish it did support third-party apps!) They pretty much killed off this API.

You can link a Squarespace site to a domain name that you’ve registered elsewhere. They have detailed guides for linking to common registrars, like Hover and Namecheap. Or, you’ll need full access to your domain’s DNS records so you can add CNAME records and A Records.

Personally, I prefer my clients buy a domain name from a different company that is hosting their site. Fewer conflicts of interest if one of those providers starts to behave badly.

Squarespace has extensive help documentation. Start there (instead of googling) so you have the latest info.

https://support.squarespace.com/

Also, if you can’t get a .edu address, you can buy .education.

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Isn’t your lab website hosted on your university’s servers? Surely you’d need to work through their CMS.

Thank you so much Margaret! I’m reading this now.

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Your questions have been answered already but I’ll recount some of my experiences:

Posting from iOS has been a bit problematic, however,
I’ve been able to make it work somewhat with Shortcuts (Open In… and MD from Rich Text) and, Dropshare for creating image links that you can easily use for embedding Markdown image links