I’m sure you have all been waiting on the edge of your chairs for the ability to integrate Design Float with your websites and blogs. Well now you can! The below options should allow you to easily integrate a “Float It” button to your website pages and blog posts both manually and dynamically. The first time the button is click for an article, it will bring the user to the submit entry page. After the entry has been submitted, all future clicks will count as floats which will be displayed to the left of the float button. See this blog for a working example and enjoy!

Website & Blog Integration

Do you want to give your website or blog visitors the option to submit your stories to Design Float and “Float” them? Make it easy for them by including the the link and icons below next to each piece of content allowing your visitors to easily “Float” your articles and blog posts!

Design Float has passed the 300 member mark and in only 30 days. This is far faster than I expected. I hope that everyone is continuing to find the site helpful and useful. Our repeat visitors is still increasing by about 25% a day which is a great sign. I also listen to the feedback I receive, so please feel free to use the contact form to send me any thoughts, suggestions, complaints, etc.

Well I was trying to avoid adding Google Adsense to the site, but I’m not confident in the server setup that is currently powering Design Float. My email has been intermittent over the past couple of days and with the boost in traffic the site has received from the Smashing Magazine article, response and load times have increased more than I’d like. I’ve never really experimented with ads on a site so I’m giving them a shot to see whether or not they could potentially offset the cost of a dedicated or semi-dedicated server. I can’t currently afford the monthly bill for one, so I either need to offset the potential cost with advertising, or find someone to sponsor the site and donate more solid hosting.

If I don’t think the Google Ads will do enough to help, I’ll take them down and in the meantime if anyone knows of any kickass deals on reliable dedicated or semi-dedicated hosting, please let me know. I apologize to anyone who finds the ads particularly annoying, I tried to make them as subtle and tasteful as possible and, like I said, if I don’t think it’ll help they’ll be coming down.

Well, as many of you may have noticed, DF has been down most of the weekend. I woke up Saturday morning to find a nice Internal Server Error page on Design Float and promptly proceeded to freak out. After restoring the previous nights backup, everything was back to normal. But that didn’t last long. When I got back home later on that day, the error was back. One more restore and we’re back online. Then I woke up Sunday morning to find that annoying error back again.

I believe I have traced the culprit to a configuration change I made that enabled gzip compression for the site’s Javascript files. I have disabled the setting in the database so I think we should be back to normal.

I apologize for anyone who tried to visit the site this weekend and found it out of commission. I guess it’s just one of those frustrations that goes along with running a website of this size and complexity.

Design Float has been live for exactly 20 days today. As I mentioned in my last post, the response has been tremendous. I’ve received tons of emails from visitors, the majority of them praising Design Float, and some of them giving me feedback that has lead to several small improvements around the site. Please keep the feedback coming! If you have sent me an email and I have not responded yet, I apologize as I’m getting backed up.

Even with all the positive feedback, my primary measure of whether or not visitors truly find Design Float useful is if they come back, so I decided to release a few snapshots illustrating what I feel is the success of Design Float so far:

As you can see in the graphs, both the numbers of unique and repeat visitors are steadily increasing, with slight dips over the weekends. This is encouraging and I’m excited to see that people are finding the project useful enough to return.

Thank you again for all of those who are helping to build a successful resource and community for designers everywhere. I will continue to work on the bugs and to implement the suggestions I receive!