Live data and connected accounts

What Live data does

There is no Connections page in Enchant.ee. Every connector lives inside the widget that uses it. Open your page in the editor, tap the widget, and the sheet titled Edit Widget opens with that widget's controls in it — the connector is one of them.

Six widgets can go and fetch something for you:

• Social Link — a real follower or subscriber count, plus your latest post.
• Stats — up to four big numbers, each one pointed at its own platform.
• Posts — your blog, pulled in from its RSS feed.
• Film log — your recent watches from Letterboxd.
• Bookshelf — a shelf from Goodreads.
• Music — search a song catalogue, or paste a share link and get a player.

The Embed widget belongs in the same chapter but is not a connector: it fetches nothing and renders the other site's own player or card. It has a section at the end.

Two different kinds of freshness

This distinction decides how you work with each one, so it is worth fixing in your head now.

• Handles refresh themselves. Once a Social Link or a Stats row has been fetched once, the number is re-read on the server every time somebody loads your public page. You never have to open the editor again.
• Feeds do not. The Posts, Film log and Bookshelf widgets update only when you press Sync in the editor. Nothing happens on its own.

All seven of those widgets also have a Background color picker, which has nothing to do with connecting anything and is left out of the tables below.

Connecting a social widget to a live number

A Social Link widget normally just shows an icon that links out. For six platforms you can also paste your public handle and have the widget fill itself with your real follower count and your latest post — title, thumbnail, how long ago, and a link straight to it.

You never log in to the platform for this. You type a public handle or profile URL, and that is all.

1. 1Open the editor and tap the social widget. The Edit Widget sheet opens.
2. 2Under Platform, pick the network.
3. 3Find the field labelled Live data and type your handle. The placeholder tells you the shape it wants.
4. 4Press Fetch. It reads Fetching… while it works, and Refresh from then on.
5. 5On success a toast reads Live data connected with the number it found, for example 12.4K subscribers.
6. 6A green dot appears under the field with the words Auto-updates from and the platform's name. That dot is the thing keeping it current.
7. 7Change Display style so the number is actually visible — the next section is about why that step matters.

What to type, and what comes back

What Fetch writes into the widget

It only fills fields the platform actually returned, and it is careful not to overwrite you:

• Link — the profile URL worked out from your handle, but only if you had not typed a real one yourself. A URL you typed is never replaced.
• Number — the count, shortened (12.3K).
• Label — only if you left it empty.
• Post title, Post image and Meta — taken from the latest post.
• The tap target of the Post display, so it opens that post rather than your profile.

Platforms with no live data

For Website, X / Twitter, LinkedIn, Dribbble, Spotify and Email the Live data field does not appear at all. The panel says why: "Stat/post numbers for this platform are entered manually — this network has no free public API to auto-fetch."

• YouTube channels with a hidden subscriber count fill nothing rather than an invented figure.
• YouTube's number is rounded by Google to three significant figures. That is the platform's behaviour, not ours.
• Discord takes an invite code, not a server name. Its "latest" slot shows the server name and an online count, not a message.
• Results are cached for one hour. Pressing Refresh again inside that hour returns the same numbers — expected, not a failure. Failures are not cached, so a corrected handle retries straight away.

One thing you may notice while adding social widgets: on the Novice plan the editor's Design panel shows a plan-usage meter labelled Links that counts your social widgets out of eight, and at eight it reads Link limit reached — upgrade for unlimited. It is a signpost rather than a gate — nothing refuses a ninth social widget — and connecting live data is free on every plan either way.

Choose a display style that shows it

This is the commonest disappointment with the whole feature. Fetch worked, the toast said Live data connected, and the widget on the canvas looks exactly the same as before. Nothing is broken — the default display simply does not show numbers.

The field is Display style, a row of four buttons in the social widget's edit sheet.

Leave Label blank and the widget falls back to a sensible word per platform: subscribers for YouTube and Telegram, members for Discord and Reddit, monthly listeners for Spotify, and followers for everything else.

Disconnecting a handle

Tap the disconnect link next to the green dot. There is no confirmation dialog and no toast — the green line simply goes away.

TikTok and Instagram

These two are built differently from the handle connectors, which is why they are stuck: neither platform publishes a follower count you can read from a public profile, so a handle field would have nothing to read. They would need you to authorise Enchant.ee against your own account instead — and that is not switched on here.

Everything else on a TikTok or Instagram widget works normally: the icon, the link, the Display style row, and the Number and Post title fields you fill in yourself. Only the automatic part is missing.

Live numbers in the Stats widget

The Stats widget shows up to four big numbers. Each row can be pointed at one of the same handle-based platforms, so the number keeps itself up to date instead of going stale the week after you typed it.

1. 1Select the Stats widget. Under Stats (up to 4), add your rows — value, label and an optional trend.
2. 2A section called Live sources (optional) appears as soon as one row exists.
3. 3Each row shows its number, a dropdown, and — once you pick a platform — a handle box and a Fetch button.
4. 4The dropdown starts on manual, and a manual row reads typed by hand beside it.
5. 5Type the handle and press Fetch. The button shows an ellipsis while it works.
6. 6Success reads Stat 1 updated — the row's own number — with the value it found.

Your blog in the Posts widget

The Posts widget can import your writing from an RSS or Atom feed — the standard list of recent posts that nearly every blogging platform publishes. Substack, Medium, Ghost and WordPress all work.

1. 1Select the Posts widget and find Sync from your blog (RSS).
2. 2Paste your feed address. The placeholder shows the shape: https://you.substack.com/feed.
3. 3Press Sync. It reads Syncing with a turning icon while it works.
4. 4Success reads Imported 5 entries with "Entries stay editable — re-sync any time."

Each imported post arrives with its title, its link, the date as Jun 2026, the first category as a tag, and an excerpt cut to 140 characters.

• Up to five posts come across, which matches the widget's own Posts (up to 5) limit.
• Pasting your site address usually works too. If the address you gave is not a feed, it tries again with /feed on the end.
• The address is remembered and pre-filled in the field next time.

Letterboxd in the Film log widget

The Film log widget imports your recent watches, with your own star ratings, straight from your Letterboxd profile.

1. 1Select the Film log widget and find Sync from Letterboxd.
2. 2Type your username, @username, or the address of your profile — letterboxd.com/username is enough. The feed address is worked out for you.
3. 3Press Sync.

• Up to six films come across, matching the widget's own limit — the Add film button disappears at six rows.
• What is imported: title, year, your star rating (0 to 5, in halves), and whether it was a rewatch.
• What is not: the liked heart, and rewatch counts above one. Imported rewatches arrive as ×1 — bump them with the Rewatch stepper if you want the real number.

Every row stays editable by hand. A film you add yourself starts at rating 3.5, and the rating slider runs 0 to 5 in steps of 0.5.

Goodreads in the Bookshelf widget

The Bookshelf widget imports a Goodreads shelf — what you are reading, what you have finished, and what is queued up.

1. 1Select the Bookshelf widget and find Sync from Goodreads (shelf RSS).
2. 2Paste either the shelf's RSS address (goodreads.com/review/list_rss/…) or the ordinary shelf page address (goodreads.com/review/list/<id>?shelf=…), which is converted for you.
3. 3Press Sync.

• Up to six books come across — the Add book button disappears at six rows.
• Status is worked out from your shelves: currently-reading becomes reading, to-read becomes queued, and anything else becomes finished.
• Your star rating comes across when it is above zero.
• Reading progress does not. Set the percentage yourself with the per-book slider.

A book you add by hand starts as queued, which shows neither slider; switch it to reading for the progress slider or finished for the rating one.

The Music widget

The Music widget works two ways, chosen by a pair of buttons at the top of its edit sheet: Search songs and Paste link.

Search songs — a 30-second preview player

1. 1Tap Search songs and type into Find a song (30s preview player).
2. 2Press Search, or press Enter. The button stays disabled until you have typed at least two characters.
3. 3Up to eight results come back, each with artwork, title and artist.
4. 4Tap the one you want. A toast reads Track set, followed by the track name and "30s preview plays right on your page."
5. 5The chosen track appears in a confirmation row with a green on canvas chip.

The panel is honest about what this is: "Search is free (iTunes catalog) — visitors tap play for a 30-second preview, no login needed." Nobody needs an account of any kind to hear it. Tracks with no preview clip are filtered out of the results entirely.

Paste link — an embedded player

1. 1Tap Paste link and paste a share link into Music link.
2. 2A row appears reading Detected: with a chip naming what it recognised — spotify, soundcloud, youtube, apple, or unknown link.
3. 3For Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube a small auto-fill title link appears on the right. Tap it to read the track title from the provider.
4. 4Optionally fill Caption / now playing (optional) and pick a Caption position.

The link field accepts Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube and YouTube Music, and Apple Music. Apple Music has no auto-fill — that link is deliberately hidden for it, because Apple publishes no way to read the title. Type it yourself.

A link nothing recognises renders a placeholder tile reading Music with the hint "Paste a Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube or Apple Music link" — a useful sign that you pasted a page address rather than a share link.

The Embed widget

The Embed widget — its tile in Add a widget is labelled Embed and described YouTube, Insta, Spotify… — is the catch-all for pulling in content from a site that has no widget of its own. Nothing is fetched by us; it renders the other site's own player or card.

The field is Embed link or HTML code, and it takes either. Paste a link (YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Vimeo, TikTok, Twitter) or the full embed code — the blockquote or iframe markup you copy from the other platform's own embed option. It works out which of the two you gave it.

A Detected: chip names what it recognised: youtube, vimeo, spotify, instagram, tiktok, twitter or custom. A second chip reads HTML embed when you pasted markup. The box grows from two lines to five as soon as your text contains a tag.

How often your public page updates

Once a social widget or a stats row has been fetched once, the numbers are refreshed on the server whenever your public page is served. You do not have to open the editor again, and you do not have to publish again.

Three timings decide how fresh that actually is:

• Each platform's answer is cached for one hour. Asking twice inside the hour gets the same figure.
• Your public page is rebuilt at most every 300 seconds — five minutes.
• Each page render gives the refresh 800 milliseconds to come back. If it is slower, that render uses the values already saved.

Put together: a change on YouTube can take roughly an hour, plus a rebuild cycle, to show up on your page. That is normal.

Three things that look like connectors and are not

Onboarding — Connect your socials

Step three of setup is headed Connect your socials with seventeen boxes to type handles into. Despite the name, nothing is connected: it creates plain social link widgets on your first page. No follower counts, no fetching. A bare handle is turned into that platform's profile address; a full https:// address passes through unchanged.

Settings — Linked accounts

The Linked accounts card in Settings is a private notepad, and its own subtitle says so: "A private scratchpad, saved on this device. To show links on your page, use the social widget." Even the save toast is worded carefully — it names the platform and then says where it went, as in Instagram saved on this device, never "linked".

• Nothing is sent to the server. It lives in this browser only, so a second device shows an empty list.
• It never appears on your public page. For that you need a social widget.
• The address must be a full one. Anything that does not start with http:// or https:// is refused with Paste a full link — it should start with https://.

AI Composer — Use my connected accounts

The Composer's Links card offers a button called Use my connected accounts, which turns each account you have linked into a link row. Account linking is the TikTok and Instagram flow from earlier in this chapter, and it is unavailable, so the button has nothing to import and reports No connected accounts yet — link one in Settings. Add your links with Add a link instead.

The card holds up to 40 links. Each row takes a label of up to 60 characters and an address of up to 500. Once you have 40, the Add a link button hides itself.

Limits worth knowing

When something goes wrong

These are the messages this feature can actually produce, and what each one means.

If a fetch keeps failing on a handle you are sure about, remember that failures are never cached — you can correct the handle and press Fetch again straight away. Successes are cached for an hour, so a number that will not budge is almost always the cache, not a bug.

Still stuck? Email support@enchant.ee.