Category Archives: News & Announcements

New Feature: Case sensitive tags

Many of you have noticed that your tags aren’t fully case sensitive. In fact, the chosen case of a tag often seems very random. I can assure you that it’s not…but that’s not really what you want to hear. What you really want to hear is that now we will be respecting the case of your tags, so “cleric” and “Cleric” will now be distinct and you can choose your casing however you want.

The downside is that all existing tags will remain. This means that if you have a lot of pages tagged with a particular case, then switch to a different one, you will end up with two different tags. In other words, you can now end up with tags for both “cleric” AND “Cleric”. That’s probably not what you want.

That’s why we recently released DragonTagger, the bulk tag editing tool that works with our API. With DragonTagger you can quickly rename your tags to match whatever case you want. It’s not exactly fast (or pretty) but should do the trick.

Enjoy!

Caption Contest Update

We have some bad news, and some good news for you? Which would you prefer first? The bad news? Okay, well sadly enough, the caption contest going on right now in partnership with d20Monkey has to come to a premature end. On April 5th we’ll be closing the comment section and going through the hundreds of entries on a quest for the best!

Ah, now onto the good news. The good news is that the reason we’re doing so is because d20Monkey is going to be creating caption strips for us on the regular! That’s right folks there’s been such a positive response to this one we’d like to keep them coming at you in our monthly (and perhaps bi-monthly) newsletter.

The contest rules will stay the same, as you can earn some free ascendant time and get your caption published on d20Monkey.com however the cameo appearance will be a this one time only offer, so be sure to get those captions in for a shot at internet fame!

We hope you’re excited to read this news as we are to bring it to you, stay tuned to the blog for ongoing caption hilarity!

Seeking a User Interface Designer

If you’re a designer who loves playing tabletop role playing games and would love to play a key role in improving Obsidian Portal, we’ve got an opportunity for you.

I’ll be the first to admit it: Obsidian Portal isn’t as pretty as it could be. Ryan and I are great programmers, but we’re a little lacking in the design department. Since the beginning we wanted to bring on a professional designer, but it’s always been on the back burner. Finally, we’re at a spot where everything is in place and a designer would be a perfect fit.

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for a “hands dirty” designer. Someone who wants to get in and make the overall UI and User Experience better. Cleaning up the homepage, making the editing of pages and wikis friendlier, improving our landing page, adding useful popups, and so on. We need a gamer who uses Obsidian Portal extensively, has concrete, applicable ideas on how to make the existing features work better, and would be able to execute those ideas if given access to the code.

In addition, you must be someone willing to wear many hats. We’re a small team and that means often straying out of your comfort zone. For a designer, that means designing t-shirts, stickers, achievement badges, flyers, and just about anything graphical you can imagine.

Benefits

• Be part of a small but dynamic team. You’ll be amazed at what we can get done in a very short period of time.
• Play with cutting-edge technologies – Ruby on Rails, jQuery, MongoDB, Redis, Chef, Amazon Web Services…you name it, we’ve tried it.
• Work from anywhere on a schedule that fits you.
• Interact with an awesome community. They’ll thank you profusely every time you make Obsidian Portal easier to use and look at.
• Best of all: Make Obsidian Portal look and behave like you know it should! How often have you said, “I could do this better…” Now you can!

Qualifications

• Great understanding of UI/UX
• Competent with Photoshop and Illustrator
• Experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript/jQuery
• Not scared of interacting with server-side code. You won’t have to write it, but for testing you’ll need to be able to at least run a Ruby on Rails project on your local machine.

Compensation

This is a paid, part-time contract position. The time investment required will be quite variable, but will probably come out to about 10 hours / week. Really, it comes down to how much time you want to give to making Obsidian Portal great.

Pay rate and compensation is negotiable. Tell us what you expect from this position.

How to Apply

Send me at least 2 examples of web interfaces you have designed to biz@obsidianportal.com. Be descriptive and specific about what part you played, what you designed, and your thoughts on what works and what doesn’t. Describe what you did with CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and server side language (Ruby, PHP, Python, etc).

Finally, tell me what parts of Obsidian Portal are in dire need of redesign, and how you would go about it. There are no right answers here. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear yours.

Project GMOYFP

Hear My Words!

I’ve been listening to a lot of RPG-related podcasts lately, and I cringe every time I hear them mention a problem that Obsidian Portal solves. Whether it’s scheduling your game, keeping track of NPCs, or bringing a new player up to speed, I just want to scream at my mp3 player every time they discuss inferior solutions on how to deal with these problems.

Get Micah on Your Favorite Podcast

With that in mind, I’m launching Project GMOYFP: Get Micah on Your Favorite Podcast. I want you to reach out to your favorite podcasters and tell them to bring me on the show as a guest speaker. I love to talk about Obsidian Portal and how it can help you manage your game, but many of these podcasters have no idea who I am. When I reach out to them, they think I’m some random whacko off the Internet trying to worm my way onto the show. In fact, I’m a very specific whacko off the Internet trying to worm my way on!

Don't you want to hear what this whacko has to say?

I’ve been on The DM Guys and The Tome Show, and both times were a blast, plus I was able to hopefully introduce a few people to Obsidian Portal. I like to think that some lucky listeners out there heard the name, decided to check it out, and we helped re-energize their campaign. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part, but oh well.

Please! Do me a big favor and reach out to your favorite RPG podcasters, large or small, popular or unknown. Send the podcasters an email or post a note in their forums. A message from a regular listener and community member will carry a lot more weight than one from a whacko like me. Tell them to send me an email at micah@obsidianportal.com I’ll twist and morph my schedule and make myself available.

If we all work together, we can ensure that one more Internet whacko (me!) gets his voice heard.

Introducing: Tip Tuesday

The Melting Pot

Obsidian Portal is what we make of it, the entire site itself is an ever growing and strengthening mass of awesome contributions and gaming greatness – created by all of us and I’m especially honored to be part of the team pushing it all forward.

I’d really like to chip in a bit of my own flavor to some of our weekly activities, so I think it’s about time I added a little bit of my own spice to this Obsidian Portal grog we knock back each day.

New Feature: The Campaign Calendar + We Celebrate 4 Years!

Stop Pinching Yourselves!

No this isn’t an early April fools joke, and it’s not some hallucination or illusory spell, this is the real deal! We know you’ve been wanting a calendar for a long time now and we’re delivering in full! Introducing the Campaign Calendar tab and all the awesomeness within!

The campaign calendar allows you to easily schedule your sessions, send reminders to your players, and see who is attending at a quick glance. You can even export your calendar as an iCal file for import into all your favorite calendar managers like iCal or Google Calendar. This is just one more way to whip your game into shape.