What’s New?
We are excited to announce that you can create personalized URLs for all of your notebooks whether they are published or private, in an individual account or a team. These custom URLs should make it easier to find notebooks, share them and see what you’re looking at in channels like chats. We are hoping this makes it easier to organize content, keep track of progress or versions, and overall makes managing your notebooks more seamless.
With today’s changes you can now define a custom URL for any notebook you own or have edit access, regardless if it is private, shared, or published, in both team and individual contexts.
Folks on Observable are building everything from powerful social visualizations, operational dashboards, onboarding documents, and even handy tools to help run our standups. We’ve recently made other changes to the platform lately to help with your user experience like Permissions for Teams and Enhanced Collections. We love seeing everything you’ve created.
How to Use it?
To create a custom URL click on the “…” in the top right hand corner of your notebook and scroll down to click Set URL. `
After you Confirm changes you should see your notebook URL updated with the new URL!
Why this change?
When notebooks are first created, they are assigned a random identifier (ID) which you can see in the notebook URL. This ID stays with the notebook until it is published, at which point the ID is upgraded to a more human-friendly name.
As we continue to enhance the Observable platform, your productivity and ease of use are at the top of mind. For notebooks not destined for the land of publication, random IDs can confusing and a hassle. They obscure the notebook’s contents when shared through various channels. Imports are also often an additional lookup step, as IDs are much less memorable compared to human-friendly names. This can make it more difficult to share, remember and discover notebooks. We are hoping today’s change remedies these challenges.
For more details about this feature check out the Custom URL Documentation.
We are looking forward to hearing about your experience using custom URLs.
Please feel free to leave us feedback here about what you think! Thanks in advance for your input, and for using Observable.
