Category: Updates

Updates

October News

| Joel

Hey all,

It has been a bit quiet around the Judge WordPress Network, but I would like to provide some updates on the things we are working and focusing on right now. I will try to keep these updates more regular and thus hopefully make sure that everybody who frequently writes content on the network is up-to-date with the most recent changes and development.

Welcome Jack and Steffen!

Mr. Doyle

Mr. Doyle

Mr. Baumgart

Mr. Baumgart

We already posted this on the WordPress User Group, but no harm in repeating this here as well: Jack joined the team to focus on providing better documentation and support to our valued content creators and bloggers. Together with Jack we would also like to be more proactive in offering help and support to everybody using our platform as well as advertising it as a excellent content platform within the Judge Program. Jack will also help answering all the user and site creation requests, so that hopefully you never have to wait a long time until you can start working!

featured-authorWe also gained more help on the technical side with Steffen Baumgart joining the developer team. In fact we already released a feature of his a while ago – you can now directly assign an external author for a blog post. This means that you don’t have to spend time downloading a picture from JudgeApps and uploading it into the WordPress site. This should help keep the data size of your media library down.

Update to 4.3

We also recently updated a couple of the plugins as well as WordPress core to 4.3. Feel free to see what changed and maybe you see some new feature that is useful for your site! If you have encountered any new problems or bugs since the update, please reach out to us and we will take a look!

Regular scheduled backups

The downtime of the wiki also taught us an important lesson: backups to external servers are a thing – who knew?! We now run weekly backups of the whole network and store them on physically different servers so that we can recover content if something bad does happen. No site should directly by affected by that, but maybe you sleep a bit better knowing that it is now much harder to lose all the content you created so far.

That is it for now. Happy writing!
Joel

Updates

Why Blog on MagicJudges.org?

| lems

While blogs.magicjudges.org houses close to 100 total blogs, some judges choose to set up their blog somewhere else, such as BlogSpot or Tumblr.  This is totally fine, of course – I’d never tell someone they HAVE to blog with us.  However, I do want to make sure  potential bloggers understand some of the benefits that being on blogs.magicjudges.org can provide over those other systems.

Blogs on blogs.magicjudges.org…

 Are easier to remember and find.

– Nobody has to remember if you’re on Tumblr, BlogSpot, or some custom domain.

Tend to show up higher in Google search results.

– the magicjudges.org domain name has very high page rank, and Google values content on it highly.  For example, despite the fact ‘rikipedia’ is right in the url of Riki’s blogspot blog, googling ‘rikipedia blog’ returns his magicjudges.org blog ( The Feedback Loop ) right at or near the top.

Are aggregated into our Judge Blog Portal.

– Sorted with the newest entries at the top, the Blog Portal is a great way for readers to discover your content.

Have special tools for working with Magic cards and Magic Judges.

– Want to talk about Surrak, the Hunt Caller? Or talk about how great Robbit‘s last blog post was?  We make it nice and easy!

Are indexed and available from our custom search engine.

– Only content located on Judge Blogs and the Judge Wiki can be found with this tool: http://blogs.magicjudges.org/search/

 

If you’re a certified Magic Judge, and want to start a blog for yourself, your community, or a project you’re involved with – please go ahead and Request a Site!

– Lems