Tag Archives: obsidianportal

Obsidian Portal Launches Homepage Redesign

Today we’re excited to launch our totally redesigned home page. Our goal with this redesign is to present people with a home page thats much faster, simpler, and easier to understand how Obsidian Portal can help with running a tabletop campaign!

As you know, we’ve previously been hard at work behind the scenes upgrading our backend software and servers. We completed the upgrade 3 weeks ago, and this redesign is our first big update on the new system. We want to give a special thanks to the team at Fifth Street Creative as the lead design agency that delivered an amazing homepage design that far exceed our expectations. Plus, they’re fun to work with!

Moving forward, we will be focused on making the the site better looking and easier to use, while also improving the mobile experience and building more great features. We’ve got some great stuff in the pipeline, so keep your eyes on our Facebook page and Twitter feed for updates.

Behind the Curtain: What We’re Up To

Things have been a little slow lately in terms of feature releases, so I thought I’d pull the curtain back a little and give some insight into what we’re doing. We’re not just sitting here! Note: Some of the stuff below is fairly technical, but don’t be worried if you don’t understand it. You don’t need to understand any of this to actually use Obsidian Portal.

New Feature: Wind back the clock on your campaign

Have you ever had a player edit a page and you’re not sure what they changed? Or, you moved one little thing around and suddenly all your pretty formatting is gone. Unfortunately, you just cannot remember what you changed! So, you spend hours trying to get back to the pristine page you had before you clicked the save button. If only there were a way to wind back the clock to before!

Some random thoughts about email notification

We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about email notifications and why people do/don’t receive emails in certain situations. The email settings are a little confusing, so I thought I would try to clear things up a bit and ask for feedback at the same time.

The overall goal

What we’re trying to accomplish with the email notifications is pretty straightforward: If someone is making a change to their Obsidian Portal campaign, we assume they want others to know about it. One way is to make some edits, then open up their email and say, “Hey, I made some changes to X, Y, and Z. Go check them out!” Or, we can have the system do it for them. That’s our goal here, to make it simple and straightforward to notify the other members in your campaign that something has changed.

Campaign Map Updates – New Markers and More

The campaign maps have been needing a bit of an overhaul for a while, and I finally got a chance to make a few of the changes I’ve been wanting to do. Over the weekend, I whipped up a couple great additions to the maps, and I think you’ll like them.

General Purpose Markers

Up to now, the only markers you could add to your wiki were for wiki pages. The idea was that you would make a location in your wiki, then link to it from your map. However, as many of you have told us, that’s a little too restrictive. So, we’ve backed off that restriction and made the markers much more general purpose. You can put whatever wiki text you want in there and it will wiki-link to other pages, characters, items, you-name-it. Imagine each marker as a mini wiki page and you get the idea.

Forum Updates: Subforums and Stickies

Over the past week we’ve quietly launched two new forum features: Subforums and Stickies. You can probably guess what they do, but here’s a quick rundown anyway