Quick Start

Ok, so Clearspring Launchpad sounds cool, and you want to try it out. This document will get you up and running on the Clearspring platform, with step by step instructions. If you want to skip the reading and just go straight in, register for an account or login.

Create an account and log in

To create a (FREE) account, just go to http://www.clearspring.com/register, fill out the form, and click Submit. You'll immediately be logged into our system. You'll also receive an email from us, which you should use to validate your address (though you don't need to do that right now).

From now on, you'll be able to log in from http://www.clearspring.com/login at any time.

After logging in the first time, you'll be asked "Where do you want to add Launchpad?". You have two choices: "My web page" or "My widget". First lets add Launchpad to my web page, so choose "My web page", which will take you into the Launchpad On-Page tool.

Widgetize anything with Launchpad On-Page!

You'll now be looking at the Launchpad On-Page screen, so let's widgetize something right away. This screen will help you create a sharing menu that will allow your users to grab and share any arbitrary chunk of content (an embed tag for some Flash content, some HTML, an image, whatever) on your Web page.

There are a bunch of different ways you can use customize the menu; you've got full control over how it looks, and how it works (check out the console docs or the JavaScript configuration API docs for all of the options). For right now, just give the widget a name and press the Generate Code button. On the success page copy the generated code to get the default sharing menu.

Past the copied code into a page on your site, its basically just a simple JavaScript call that builds the sharing menu you saw in the console. You'll need to edit the code to point it to a content on the page that you want to share. You might end up with code like this:

<div id="myContent"><b>Hello World!</b>  This is what I want to share!</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.clearspring.com/launchpad/v2/standalone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
 $Launchpad.ShowMenu({ userId : "MY_ID", source : "myContent", widgetName : "My Content" });
</script>

Now that you've got the Launchpad On-Page sharing menu right on your site, try it out! Click one of the buttons and see how it takes you through the process of posting your content to wherever the user wants.

Track It from the Widget Console

Any time a user grabs your content and posts it to a new location, like you just did, Clearspring will keep track of it. Your dashboard to all of your widgets is the Widget Console; its where you go every time you log in, and you can get there at any time by clicking My Widgets at the top of the site. If you go there now, you should see the widget you just created, named exactly how you named it in console ("My Widget" in the example above).

To Check out the Analytics Clearspring is collecting on this widget by clicking the Analyze option under the widget name. You'll be able to see all of the places your widget is placed, where and how many times it is viewed, and a whole lot more. you can read all about our in-depth Analytics here.

What Next with Launchpad On-Page?

Now that you've gone through the basic process of sharing Web page content using Launchpad On-Page, go ahead and explore the Widget Console, customizing the sharing menu, our Analytics, and all of the other options available to you. If you want to read some more, try this introduction and the FAQ. And remember, if you ever get stuck, just try this.

Register a Widget with Launchpad In-Widget

In addition to sharing your Web page content using the Launchpad On-Page menu, you can actually use Clearspring to completely manage your widget -- this gives it a number of advanced capabilities, including a built-in sharing menu so users can get the widget for themselves no matter where they run across it. To get up and running with the system in this way, you'll need to have a URL to your pre-built widget already available (you can use our sample widget to start with).

From the console, just click the Add Widget button to start the process.

After clicking the button, you'll be asked "Where do you want to add Launchpad?". You have two choices: "My web page" or "My widget". Choose "My widget" then choose "Quick Wrap" to begin the widget registration process. This tool will guide you through a few steps to get your widget registered in our system.

Specify the type of widget, its URL, its name and categorize it

You'll want to specify which type of widget you are dealing with, and the URL of where it is located. Widgets can be images, Flash movies (ActionScript 2 or ActionScript 3), or standard HTML content (with or without Javascript). No matter the type, you'll need to provide the direct URL at which your widget is available. You can read more about the different types of widgets in our docs.

Remember, you can use the Hello World sample, as we did above, if you want to get a feel for the platform but don't yet have a widget to play with.

Specify a name for your widget and a category, then just click Save New Widget.

Finish up!

Your widget is now registered in our system. As you'll see on this last step, there are lots of other things you can do. You can grab the embed code so that you can place your newly registered widget on you Web site, you can customize the sharing menu, edit your widget data; such as sizing, About information, screenshots and more for your widget, to make it easy to publish it to all the popular widget galleries, and more.

You can always go back to the Widget Console to see a list of all of your widgets, and customize almost everything about them.

Give your Registered Widget Some Power

Now that you've got your widget registered in the platform, you might want to take a look at how configuration works, or just jump right in and read about all the different ways you can distribute your widget.

The simplest options for getting your widget out in the world are to just get the code, from the success page or in the console at Publish -> Get the Code, or just view your automatically-created Widget Homepage, Publish -> Widget Homepage. You can read about all of the customization and control options in the Widget Console documentation.

Also, if it's maximum control over the User Interface and the content loading sequence you're after, check out the Launchpad In-Widget APIs.

Onward and upward!

clearspring - the widget network.

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