Squarespace is the Apple of the CMS industry. It's beautiful, fine-tuned and a great product for the average Joe Blow like me. But making Squarespace do exactly what you want takes a little extra effort.

Despite leaving Squarespace recently, Sid O'Neill's blog Crate of Penguins is chalked full of little tips and tricks to make Squarespace more customizable. I've implemented a few of his tricks here on The Newsprint and I couldn't be happier.

You would think a simple Google Search would shed light on the potential of code snippets in Squarespace. But I found next to nothing useable. Sid's tricks are the only hacks I've been able to implement and I wanted to put them in one place for others to find.

Most recently, I used one of Sid's hacks to create a full index of all Newsprint posts. You can find this growing list in the Archive. Sid explains how to create a full post index here.

If you follow Sid's instructions exactly, everything should work perfectly. To find your "Collection ID", view your page source when viewing a specific post. Search "collectionid" in the page source and use the first lengthy set of characters. It took me a little while to determine which Collection ID to use, but after realizing the correct ID was the first set of characters rather than the second set, everything worked perfectly.

Next, Sid outlines how to add Bigfoot footnotes to a Squarespace site. Again, like the full post index hack, following Sid's step-by-step tutorial works perfectly. Be mindful of using your own URLs to find your Bigfoot files. Otherwise you'll end up using someone else's code and you will have no control over the design of the footnotes. I used Sid's code just as he jumped over to Statamic and I had to quickly ask Joe how to properly implement my own Bigfoot footnotes.

Lastly, as Conor McClure was moving his site over to Squarespace, Sid helped the two of us implement proper permalinks at the bottom of each post. You can find the screenshot he used to show us this neat hack on Twitter. All you have to do is slightly alter the link portion of the hack to display your custom permalink.

This entire post is designed to offer a more comprehensive list of small Squarespace tricks that even code-airheads like myself can use. It's also designed to say thanks to Sid for his help and for his future help.

Maybe — just maybe — I'll convince him one day to jump back to Squarespace and become a dedicated Squarespace hacker. I bet there are people willing to pay for his services.