Hello everyone! Liam here again to go over stuff done, plans and whatever else comes to mind. This was first posted on Patreon.

Articles

Below the author bio box is now a "popular articles from the last month", with a list of three randomized articles from within the last 30 days. Just another way to help people find some articles they may have missed because there's a lot. People keep saying how they're constantly missing things, so perhaps a real small reminder that's different each time will help. The box respects any article tags you blocked too.

Articles themselves are using now using a much more "standard" (quoted because there's no real standard) URL.

Before we were:

/articles/title-slug.ID

Now it's:

/year/month/title-slug

It's not a huge change and old URLs still work but it's an important one for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Linking into that, titles on GOL are now smaller going forwards. Our limit was far too high which was again causing SEO issues. It's been adjusted down from 110 to 90 which doesn't seem like much but it's going to be better. People joked before about me cramming everything into a title and it's true but as it turns out the mighty search engines really don't like it and we were being penalized for it.

Article Media

We've now switched over to using Digital Ocean Spaces for hosting images, videos and such for articles. So if you see uploads.golmedia.net being queried, don't be alarmed, that is us. It might even help deal with privacy plugins, as they don't like cookies from the main site when it loads in media. It's a small extra sum each month but it really helps. It allows us to continue expanding in size and traffic and it's giving us a lot of room for growth.


Comments

I've reworked some more of our parser, as we continue moving away from BBCode to Markdown. CODE boxes are now using markdown triple backticks ```.

Additionally, I did a rework on the URL matcher for comments/forum posts. Hopefully it will more accurately pick up URLs people put in, without using markdown on them to automatically turn them into clickable links. Early indications are that it works much better than the original one which often cut off links that had special queries and characters in them (hello Wikipedia).


App DB

Item pages finally mention if the item was crowdfunded. We have the big crowdfunding list, but when viewing a direct item it didn't mention it. Now it does. See 7 Days to Die as an example. Additionally, the JSON for each page mentioned in a previous monthly update (add ?json to the end of any app in the DB - example ) was expanded again. It now also mentions if something is a bundle or if it was crowdfunded.

Our Free Games page had a tweak to the way we pull in titles from Steam, which was causing some dupes. This has been fully solved making the page much more useful.


Mailing List

Turns out the mailing list was missing a check. If you had an account and weren't logged in, and tried to add yourself into it then it would let you be in the guest mailing list. Now, it will tell you to login. Otherwise you would be able to add yourself twice.


Supporter Forum

Turns out we weren't clear enough for someone on the Patreon tiers, as you need to pledge at least $4 for access to the Supporter Forum. This is now made clear. To be fair though, $4 (and originally when it was $5 before we reduced it) has always been the minimum for any special perks since the start of us using Patreon.


Supporter Tiers

We've done some adjustments here, as nothing really matched up anywhere.

Supporter Plus said it was the "Top Supporter" on the website badge which didn't match the tier name or the Discord role for Patreon, so we've matched the badge text on the website to actually say "Supporter Plus" now as it makes more sense to be consistent.

On top of that, the higher level badge now replaces the lower one otherwise it's badge info overload and this way it's actually clear to people you're a higher level. Both level badges also now have black text, as the white was too poor in contrast.

Our Discord Channel has also been updated, to make all role colours match the website badge colours for added consistency.

As always though, we're thankful for ALL support of ANY level <3


The Forum (you are here - hello!)

The Forum RSS feed has expanded! It's now possible to follow specific forums! Hooray! This might be one of the most requested features for the forum. Look for the RSS icon inside each forum, or by the last post info for each forum if you're in category view.

Additionally, when viewing a single forum the top section now matches up to the main forum page in style. So you get the buttons to instantly view all topics, categories and a jump-list menu for forums.

Hopefully these changes make everything on the forum that little bit more convenient. It's kind of worrying how people moved away from using traditional forums, so much can be lost to the likes of Discord, Telegram and so on. Search engines don't pick up these social clients but they do pick up Forums like ours when people search for things. It's part of why we always ask people to refrain from asking for help in emails or DMs or emails to us - to help others when solutions are found.

Do keep our forum in mind ;)


Page load speed

I've moved around some JavaScript/CSS that wasn't needed into the pages they are, and deferred loading on almost all of it. Plus we're also now only loading some JS files dynamically when needed reducing the amount of "render-blocking" resources.

This will help page loading speed and save people mobile data too. On Google's page speed insights, for mobile viewing we went from a low 50 points up to ~65. Pages should feel snappier as a result. For Desktop, Google page speed insights consistently puts us above 90/100. Nice!


Discord

Our Discord Channel, specifically the #news part now automatically gets posted to by us when a new article is posted. Just like we do for Telegram. No more relying on an external service to read from the RSS feed - more control for us, hooray!


GamingOnLinux turns 11 soon

Next month on July 5, GamingOnLinux.com turns 11.

What do you think we should do? Very exciting!


Final Bits

Articles posted since last main monthly update: 258.

It's been an incredibly tough time for everyone, so I hope you're doing well and staying safe.

Always remember the inbox is open any time for you: [email protected]. However, please keep direct tech support requests to the Forum.

Last edited by Liam Dawe on 14 June 2020 at 8:46 pm UTC