Two new options: share widgets or live copy them!

Until today, there were some clear limitations to your sharing options. You always had to share an entire page, for example. Also, you could copy a single widget to another page, but you had to manually update it if you wanted to change it. At the request of many of our users, we’ve changed this today.

First up: share individual widgets

Sharing information on the internet is simple and easy. There are many social media platforms, full of wonderful options like thumbs up, like, retweet, whatever. Your short video, selfie or food pic can circle the world in less than one second.

But what if you just want to share a few links to your partner or colleague? Nothing fancy, just your favorite holiday rental options, some tasty cauliflower recipes, or a few links to documents you want to share? start.me has you covered!

Instructions

• With the mouse pointer, go to a Bookmarks widget. The More button will appear (three dots).
• Click the More button > Share.
• Toggle the option Anyone with the widget can see this widget to On (it will turn green).
• Now your widget gets assigned a random link, you can copy and share. In the header of a shared widget, you’ll see a Shared tag.

Be careful: there is no additional security check to this feature. If you share a link to your widget, it will become visible to anyone with the link until you toggle the share option off.

Also: you can share not just bookmarks widgets, but any other widget. Think Todo lists, Notes widgets, or even RSS widgets. And did we mention that it’s a free feature?

Create a Live Copy of any widget

Another important new addition is available to all our PRO users. As of today you can put the same widget on your pages, and keep them all in sync. We call this a Live copy. It’s especially useful as:

• A Table of contents widget (TOC). Like on this OSINT page, by Lorand Bodo.
• A Speed Dial widget to access your favorites from your most visited pages.
• An Shared links widget with bookmarks or notes that are interesting for multiple teams.

Instructions

• With the mouse pointer, go to a widget you want to copy. The More button will appear (three dots).
• Click the More button > Copy, merge and move > Copy.
• Now select the destination page, column, and position.
• Select the option Live copy > Copy.
• Now we will create a live copy on the page you determined. In the header of the Live copy, you’ll see a live copy icon. When you click it, you’ll see the option to return to the source widget and make changes.
  

  

  
  

Example use case: a school district

Here’s a case of one of our users: a district has chosen for start.me to manage the homepage for all of their 12 schools. They have separate pages for each school.

On each school page they have a widget with links to the shared District apps. They have 12 instances of this widget. When they want to add a new link, they have to update it 12 times.

Not anymore!

With the new live copy, they can update all 12 widgets at once. And they don’t have to be bookmarks widgets either: you can put a Latest News widget on every homepage, and update them from your own start page.

We hope that you will try these new features right away. And if you like them (or not!) please let us know in the comments below. We love to hear from the community!