Inspiration
A grid of visual inspiration pulled from any Are.na channel. No account required — just pick a channel and the grid fills with whatever the channel's curators are saving.
Are.na has thousands of curated channels — places where people collect images they find interesting around a theme. The Inspiration widget points at one channel, pulls a pool of its recent blocks, and renders a random subset every new tab — so the dashboard feels alive without burning API calls. Free, no sign-in, no extra permissions beyond the are.na API.
Add it to your dashboard
Press E for edit mode, A to add, and pick Inspiration. It lands at eight columns wide, four rows tall — comfortable for a 4×3 grid of twelve blocks. Open its settings (gear icon) to choose a different channel or resize the grid.
Picking a channel
The settings dropdown ships with eighteen pre-vetted channels — large,
long-maintained, broadly appealing. Pick one and the widget reloads.
Or hit Custom… to paste any are.na channel URL; the widget
extracts the trailing slug so you can paste the full link
(https://are.na/<user>/<channel-slug>) or just
the slug.
Channels are public on Are.na — if the URL works in a browser, the widget can read it. Private channels and content behind login walls aren't supported.
How the grid fills
The grid always fills the widget. Every supported block count maps to a fixed (cols × rows) rectangle that uses the available space exactly:
1= 1×1 — single hero block, fills the whole card2/3= 2×1 / 3×1 — horizontal strip4= 2×2 grid6= 3×2,8= 4×2,9= 3×312= 4×3 (the default),16= 4×420= 5×4,24= 6×4 — dense mosaic
Resizing the widget on the dashboard changes the cell shape (more landscape vs. more portrait) — the block count and grid template stay the same. Match the count to the size: 24 blocks in a 4×3 widget is too dense; 4 blocks in a 12×6 widget feels empty.
Settings
| Setting | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Channel Pick a curated Are.na channel from the dropdown — Graphic Design, Web Design, UI Patterns, Mobile Design, Typography, Illustration, Photography, Movie Posters, Album Covers, Editorial / Layout, Logos & Symbols, Branding, Architecture, Interiors, Fashion, 3D / CGI, Animation, or Art Direction. Or paste any are.na channel URL via the Custom… option. | dropdown | Graphic Design |
| Blocks Discrete grid sizes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 20, or 24. Each value packs into a perfect rectangle (e.g. 12 = 4×3, 16 = 4×4, 24 = 6×4) so the grid fills the widget without leftover whitespace at any height. | dropdown | 12 (4×3) |
| Show title + contributor on hover When on, hovering a block reveals a soft gradient overlay with the block's title and the Are.na user who added it. Off keeps the grid clean — pure imagery. | toggle | on |
Small things you might miss
- Click any block to open its source. Are.na blocks often link out — clicking a tile opens the block's source URL in a new tab, falling back to the block's are.na page if no source is set.
- Image blocks only. Are.na channels contain image, link, and text blocks. The widget shows image blocks only — over- fetching from the API to backfill the grid means a channel with mixed types still renders the count you asked for, just from the image subset.
- The grid is the silhouette of the channel. The widget pulls the most recent blocks from the channel, so what you see follows the curator's pace. Active channels feel like a feed; quiet channels feel like an exhibit.
Heads up
- Cache is 30 minutes; the slice is per tab. The widget pulls a 100-block pool from the channel and caches that for half an hour, then picks a random subset on every new tab — so the tiles change every time you open a tab without an API call. Hit the refresh button in the toolbar to pull a fresh pool right away if a channel just added something interesting.
- No NSFW filter. Are.na is a curated platform; the curated channels in the dropdown are SFW. If you paste a custom URL, you're trusting the curator.
- Are.na rate-limits aggressive use. One widget hitting one channel every 30 minutes is well below any cap. If you have many Inspiration widgets pointing at many channels, they share the channel cache — no duplicate requests.