Interactives are what make an Igloos story more than a plain article: charts, timelines, post cards, subscribe forms and fully custom components, all saved in your publication's library and dropped into any post or page.
The kinds at a glance
| Group | Kinds | Stays current |
|---|---|---|
| Data | Chart, Table, Timeline | No — fixed values you configure |
| Post bands | Single post, Recent posts, Related posts, Archive | Yes — resolved when a reader loads the page |
| Media | Embed — Spotify and Apple Podcasts players | Yes — the provider player is built at render |
| Newsletter signup | Subscribe form | Yes — writes straight to your subscriber list |
| Sandbox | Your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript | Sealed frame, themed by your publication |
Saved, reusable, fixed
Every interactive is created once, stored in your library and reused anywhere.
Data
Chart — bar, line, pie and area charts from label and value points. Table — plain-text headers and rows. Timeline — dated entries rendered as a chronology.
Post bands
Cards that list your own stories, resolved against your published content at the moment a reader loads the page, so they are always current:
- Single post — one story you pin by hand. If it is later unpublished or deleted, the band quietly renders nothing instead of a broken card.
- Recent posts — your latest stories, as a list or carousel, with an optional tag filter and heading.
- Related posts — suggestions tied to the story a reader is on.
- Archive — the full published archive, with an optional heading.
On a home page, bands coordinate automatically so the same post never appears twice.
Media
Embed — podcast players. Providers are strictly allowlisted — Spotify and Apple Podcasts — and you supply the provider and the episode or show ID; the platform builds the player. Raw markup and arbitrary addresses are never accepted.
Newsletter signup
A subscribe form with your heading, label, layout and width, wired straight to your subscriber list. New signups appear under the Subscribers card in Settings.
See them live
Every demo in this section uses sample data, so you can see the shape of each kind without anyone inventing a dataset for you. First, the chart kind:
A bar chart, built from label–value pairs
View chart data
| label | value |
|---|---|
| Jan | 4 |
| Feb | 6 |
| Mar | 5 |
| Apr | 9 |
| May | 7 |
| Jun | 11 |
The timeline kind — the same sample story, told in dated entries:
A timeline, built from dated entries
Idea sketched
The format problem, written down.
Editor prototype
The first interactive attached to a draft.
Private beta
A handful of publications move in.
Open registration
Signup opens to everyone.
Post bands resolve against this publication as the reader loads the page — here are its three most recent stories, live:
Writing & Publishing
How our writing studio designed from the scratch works.
Customizing your publication
The publication itself follows a strict layout to maximize readability and interactivity but you can customize the look and all pages are fully modular.
Getting Started
Every Igloos account comes with one publication: a themed site at its own address, a home page, an archive and Snowflake, your AI agent for making interactives.
Podcast embeds need a real show, so none is demonstrated here — hand Snowflake a Spotify or Apple Podcasts link and it builds the player.
The sandbox, in detail
The sandbox is the escape hatch for interactives the standard kinds cannot express: your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript, published as one interactive. Its rules are what make it safe to run next to your article:
- The code runs in a sealed frame with no network, no storage and no access to the page around it.
- Your publication's theme — colors and fonts — and a small kit of prebuilt components ship inside the frame, and your code loads after them, so a custom interactive starts on-theme.
- The kit covers cards, stats, timelines, tabs, accordions, buttons, meters and pure-CSS charts, plus declarative behaviors.
Creating them
Build one yourself from the editor's interactive menu, filling in plain forms. Or ask Snowflake in the chat panel — it creates interactives through validated tools, attaches the result to your draft and shows its work; for sandbox code, it writes the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for you.
Part of Product guides. Next guide: Snowflake & MCP.