#silk feature

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Fall Cleaning: A Better Interface, and More Improvements

After shipping big features like our new layout options and dynamic datacard templates, we thought it was time for some fall cleaning. Let me show you how a series of small but much requested tweaks and a bit of new paint makes for a nicer Silk.

A more sophisticated user interface

To help your readers focus more easily on the content in the body of your Silk, we removed the bright colors in the navigation and added spacing around the widgets and menus. We think this layout is cleaner and easier on the eyes.

Improvements to visualizations

Silk got smarter when switching visualizations through the explore tab. When selecting a visualization, it looks at your data and selects the tags that make sense. For example, Silk will automatically recognize location data for maps and numerical data for charts. So when we create a column chart on solarsystem.silk.co, Silk automatically creates a chart plotting the mass of all planets:

Improvements to the dashboard

The dashboard now loads more quickly than before

Inviting someone to your Silk is easier

Accessing settings is also easier

There are more ways to delete pages

You can now double click on a collection’s name to rename it.

Various other improvements

External links now open in new tabs by popular request.

The carousel that appears when you click on the Explore, Datacards, or Pages tab has a smoother scroll action. Scroll through the carousel horizontally, and the pages will fly by. This makes it easier to navigate through your datacards.

We introduced an in-app help option. You can reach it by clicking the ‘Get Help’ button in the footer on the bottom-right of the screen. This means that you can ask us anything from inside Silk.co.

[silkapp]

The Magic of Dynamic Datacard Templating

We’re excited to announce dynamic datacard templating, a new feature that makes designing better-looking, engaging datacard a breeze.

With templating, changes you make to one datacard are automatically applied to all datacards in the same collection. Coupled with Silk’s new layout options, this lets you easily create a beautiful and interactive collection of datacards.

Let’s use a Silk with athletes as an example. By default, a datacard looks like this:

With the new layout options, you can now make a datacard look like this:

The new look and position of elements will be automatically applied to all datacards. For example, see the card for Messi:

The dynamic part comes into action when you insert widgets that refer to data specific to your datacard. For example, if you have datacards with Youtube URLs, you can automatically embed a video on all of them. Or, you can add a map to plot location information.

Dynamic datacard templates let you quickly and easily make the following changes on all datacards in a collection:

Change the placement of images

Add text blocks with copyright text or a logo

Build complex page structures with two or three-column layout sections

Add widgets (like an image or text block) and automatically create a placeholder for them

Move datacard titles, images and text blocks

Add YouTube or Vimeo videos

Build visualizations that automatically display data filtered for relevance on each datacard

The last bullet is, perhaps, one of the neatest features. The dynamic templating can automatically apply visualization filters across all datacards. Let’s take a look at the screenshot above: both datacards show a bar chart of athlete endorsement, but it is automatically filtered on the sport relevant to the athlete on the datacard

To see a real-life example of dynamic datacard templates, check out our blog post about how startup conference Slush uses this new feature to great effect.

Go ahead and edit one of the datacards on your own Silk and see how it works. Or check out the additional help articles below.

How to create dynamic visualizations

Learn more about adding dynamic visualizations, or go a step further and see how you can show results from other collections on your datacards.

How to change the layout of your datacards

See this article for help on changing the layout of your datacards, or watch this video about the new feature.

[silkapp]

Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Embedded Visualizations

Silk’s visualizations can be embedded on other websites quite easily. We are thrilled that great publications like Mashable and the Daily Dot have used them to visualize data for their stories.

The embed menu is now updated with a new ‘Embed size’ dropdown. It allows you to easily select and copy a pre-coded embed type. Options are 'small’, 'medium’, 'big’ and 'responsive’. The responsive is the newest and most important. Responsive embeds automatically adjust visualization content to match column width. This lets you make the best use of the available space, and it’s particularly important for visualization readability on mobile and tablet devices.

Silk’s new visualization engine tries to scale visualizations smartly. The more pixels available, the more information is shown. Using the responsive setting for Silk embeds on websites with a lot of room for content ensures an optimal experience for your visitors. The fixed sizes can still be used for blog themes that don’t handle responsive visualizations well.

The new embed code selector menus can be found for every Silk visualization, gallery, map and table under the 'Share & Embed’ tab in the upper right corner of any visualization. Please let us know what you think of our new embed selector. You can contact us via email or on Twitter @silkdotco or @silkjournalism. Thanks for reading.

[silkapp]

Create Silks automatically with Google Sheets and Excel

We want Silk to be a versatile data publishing platform. Creating more ways to move your data into Silk is part of that vision.

We are excited to announce that as of today Google Sheets and Excel are integrated into Silk. This makes importing your data into Silk significantly easier. No more converting a file into a CSV (although you can do that if you want). Now you can simply paste your Google Sheets URL or drag in your Excel file into our import box. Silk automatically recognizes the formatting and begins the import process.

Below is a short video that shows how importing a Google Sheet works. After adjusting the sharing settings of the sheet as specified, you just paste in the link into the importer screen. If you have more than one worksheet, Silk lets you select the correct one. For Excel files, you don’t have to do anything different. It works for either .XLS or .XLSX files.

Ready to try it out? Head over to your dashboard and create a Silk from an Excel file or Google Sheet in minutes. If you need help, our updated spreadsheet tutorial explains it all. Good luck creating awesome Silks!

[silkapp]

Updated map visualizations

We would like to announce another improved visualization! Silk’s map visualization is now clearer and better looking, and can display information in more ways. The new maps look great alongside our recently updated charts and graphs.

Life expectancy in Africa

Data from world.silk.co

As you can see, you can now display the value of number plots inside the circle. This gives you the best of both worlds when using number plots: you get a visual idea of the proportions of the tags you see, but you can also make sense of smaller differences by looking at the exact number. When the number doesn’t fit in the circle, you can make it appear in a popup by hovering over it.

To make things easier on the eyes, we also changed the styling of the map: we added a new background, different markers, and created a new color scheme. You can see what has been changed visually by looking at the new and old map, side by side:

You can learn everything about using the new maps by checking out the updated help article. If you have any feedback or questions, drop us a line, we love to hear what you think!

[silkapp]

Introducing the Group visualization

We have a new visualization to announce! The ‘Group’ visualization groups pages together based on the value of a tag on the pages.

It’s easier to explain how it works with a video:

There are four ways the Group visualization can work:

By default, pages are grouped by their first letter.

You can group pages by selecting a tag with text values.

You can also group pages by a range of numbers by selecting a numerical tag

Picking a tag with years groups the pages by a range of years

Below are embeds from the Oscar Database that show the different ways to group.

We hope you can put this visualization to good use. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions!

Oscar for best movie, grouped by first letter

Data from oscars.silk.co

Oscar for best movie, grouped by director

Data from oscars.silk.co

Oscar for best movie, grouped by IMDb rating

Data from oscars.silk.co

Oscar for best movie, grouped by year

Data from oscars.silk.co

[silkapp]

Upload any file to a Silk page

Silk lets you easily embed media that your visitors can immediately view or listen to. But for cases you need to just share a file, we now support file uploading.

Click “Edit Page”. Click on a ’+’ button. Pick ‘upload file’. Drag the file to the designated area. The file will upload and appear as a link. Easy, right?

[silkapp]

Embed Twitter Timelines on your Silk

You can now embed a live Twitter window anywhere on your Silk site! You can show any user’s Tweets and favorites, or display all the Tweets from a Twitter list.

Here I embed both my own Tweets, and the Tweets made by people on the @silkdotco/team Twitter list.

How to do this on your Silk: Click the Twitter icon via the ’+’ button and paste in a twitter handle, a handle followed by /listname, or a handle followed by /favorites (e.g. @silkdotco, @silkdotco/team, or @silkdotco/favorites). You can also paste in a full URL from a user-, list- or favorite page on Twitter.com.

Please send us a tweet or plain old email or if you want to tell us anything. All feedback is welcome!