Previously our blogging functionality has been locked behind Devlogs, meaning you have to create a project page on itch.io before you could post, and you could only post on that project page.
We’re now making it possible for anyone to post directly onto their account without the need to create a project first. This functionality has actually been available but hidden away for quite some time. We decided to open for everyone to see how people use it, if at all, and then plan how we’d like to expand it in the future.
This functionality is very much a work in progress, we’ll try to share more updates as we have them. Here’s what we have so far:
Posts dashboard
On your dashboard you’ll find a new tab, Posts, to access the new dashboard page. (Also linked from the account drop down menu in the header)
The new posts dashboard includes all posts you have authored, along with a quick summary of their stats. You can create a new top-level post on this page, or use the New devlog menu to jump directly to the appropriate page to start writing a devlog.
Keep in mind that this will only show posts that you have authored. If you have other team members writing devlogs for projects you control, you will still need to navigate to that project’s devlogs page to review those posts.
Game/jam/bundle mentions
For top-level posts, since they aren’t associated with a game page, they will be rendered using our default blogging template that you may have seen for some of our own blog blog posts.
The default template comes with a few additional features compared to devlogs:
- Including game/project URL will cause an additional section to appear that lists all games in the post, showing all the metadata and cover image for the game
- If you mention only a single game by URL, it will get a special slot in the sidebar of the post, otherwise the games will appear on the bottom of the post in a grid
- You can mention a jam by URL to have it appear in the right column. (Note at this time only a single jam will be pulled out as a mention)
- You can mention any sales or bundles and they will be displayed with all their details alongside your post
Post type picker
The “Post type” picker is available for top-level posts with some slight adjustments: Since these are not devlogs, you now have two basic options: Blog and Announcement. All of the long-form options are the same. We feel that many of the long-form post types are much more appropriate for top-level blogging as opposed to devlogs, so we’re excited to see what people write.
Language picker
We’re introducing a language picker for both devlogs and top-level posts. In the future, as we explore more tools for discovery of posts, we think it would be helpful to know what language a post is in so we can filter it where necessary.
Caveats on discovery
This is a very early form of what we’d like to do with top-level posting. At this time there are a few limitations to be aware of.
Although Devlogs have their own directory page, nothing like that exists yet for top level posts yet. The only distribution we provide for now is sharing your posts to your followers’ feeds.
Spam review
We’ve changed our system on content review for posts/devlogs because features like these are really attractive to spammers. In the past if a post was flagged by our spam detector it would be sent to our internal queue for review, but the post would be fully functional. Now, if a post if flagged by our spam detector it will be fully blocked for view until a team member reviews it. We want to show to spammers up-front that their posts are blocked to discourage them from attempting at all. We apologize to any legitimate posters who may get caught in this review step.