New Releases: ICNS-js & Shortlink Profiles

Update Time! For developers we’ve built a JavaScript library & for users we’re dropping an auto generated profile page we’re calling Shortlink 🔥

ICNS
3 min readApr 5, 2022

Surprised to see us back? We move pretty quickly 😉. Today, we’re starting to check off some of the early roadmap items that we set forth in our last blog post by releasing two new ICNS products — ICNS-js & ICNS Shortlink.

Our idea around this release is to not only release a JavaScript library to make it super easy for apps to integrate ICNS profiles, but to sweeten the deal by also releasing ICNS Shortlink pages, the first application built on top of ICNS-js.

Eager to start playing around with ICNS-js & ICNS Shortlink? Look no further:

A JavaScript Library for Building With ICNS 👷‍♀️

ICNS-js is a JavaScript library that we’ve created so that developers can easily create ICNS integrations into their application’s UI or backend node.js server, such as:

  • Start an auction & bid for ICNS domains
  • Surface user’s ICNS saved Info
  • Convert Principal ID → ICNS domain in UI

The library is built to be plug and play out of the box — import ICNS-js into your application and gain access to all of ICNS’s canisters’ public APIs instead of having to manually wire up redundant connections to each one of our five public canisters.

ICNS-js is the best way to abstract away from using messy Principal IDs and instead allow users to port their universal identity over to your application, thereby removing the application-specific data silos.

Looking to start building with ICNS-js? Check out our docs & open-source Github Repo:

Of course, when the time for an ICNS token comes, builders who incorporated ICNS early will be top of mind for distributions (after all, we want to give governance tokens who understand ICNS the most!).

ICNS Shortlink 📡

ICNS Shortlink is an automatically generated, customizable profile page for your ICNS address… think Linktree but for an application-agnostic profile that you actually own!

To set up an ICNS Shortlink page for your ICNS address, navigate to xxxx.icp.page (replacing xxxx with an ICNS address that you own, like… mike.icp.page!).

Once you connect to an ICNS Shortlink page that you are the owner or controller of through Plug, you’ll be given the ability to edit.

From the Edit page, we can have two options — configuring your profile which includes your description and avatar and add new links which can be custom links or pre-defined social links.

While simplistic right now, ICNS Shortlink displays how easily your ICNS profile can be built into any new application. After all, ICNS aims to be an open-source identity primitive that is extendable and configurable in any way the application using it sees fit.

That’s A Wrap 🗞

And that’s all she wrote. These were the first roadmap items that we promised and are happy to be delivering them. We’re really excited to see what the community builds with ICNS-js to extend the capabilities of your ICNS identity.

We also have some pretty exciting integrations in the works that we can’t wait to share — in the meantime, come jam with the team in our Discord! See you there 👋

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