Introducing the Whisthub blog
Starting a blog on Whisthub. It's something I have been thinking about for a long time, and now, after more than four years, I've finally decided to take it on!
First of all, blog posts will be mainly written in English. I am aware that currently, the majority of the players on Whisthub are either Dutch or French speaking. However, writing a blog can be tedious, so it's simply not an option to translate every post in three languages and therefore I've chosen English as the main language for the blog posts as it serves perfectly as a lingua franca and can also be useful to attract a more international and diverse audience. Don't worry, the rest of the website will remain available in French, Dutch and English, it's just the blog posts that will be mainly in English.
If you'd like a certain blog post to become available in French or Dutch and are willing to translate it yourself, you can contact me on [email protected]. Behind the scenes, I have set everything up so that certain blog posts can be made available in languages other than English, so if you provide me with a translation of a blog post, I will more than happily make it available in that language! I just don't have the bandwidth to translate all future blog posts in three languages before publishing them, though "important" ones might definitely become available in three languages from the start.
Goal of the blog
That being said, the primary reason of wanting to start a blog is that whenever a new feature - or an enhancement of an existing one - is released, I struggle with how it can be communicated effectively to the players. In the past I often just posted about it on Facebook, Instagram or X and then called it a day. This didn't really work because only a fraction of the players follows Whisthub on these platforms, and due to their algorithmic nature, those that do might never even see my announcements. By the way, you can of course still follow Whisthub on Facebook, Instagram or X (formerly known as Twitter). It really helps Whisthub grow!
To mitigate this, whenever a big feature is released, I now add a small release note about it in the lobby that shows up for a few weeks. This ensures that the majority of the players is at least aware of it. Still, I feel this is not ideal as the release note must be kept small, while some features require a more detailed explanation.
That's where the brand new Whisthub blog comes into play. A blog is an ideal place for giving some context about new features and that will also be one of its primary functions. However, a blog can be so much more than a boring collection of release notes. I also aim to use it for publishing anything related to card games in general. For example, in the future I hope to use it to share some tactics and knowledge about various card games so that new players can learn them more easily.
From a technical point of view, I have set it up to make it possible to easily show a hand as
and visualizing certain tricks can be done in the same way
This will make it easy to reason about specific game situations when writing tutorials and obviously the cards all render according to your preferences if you have a premium subscription.
I also aim to use it to share thoughts on questions that often get asked. Rest assured that certain questions get asked often enough to warrant their own blog post. I already have a few in mind!
Last but not least I don't have to limit myself to card games either. I also plan to write sometimes about the technology used on Whisthub. Obviously this might not be for you if you're not interested in these things and you're free to just ignore these blog posts, but I'm sure some of you could be interested in the technology behind Whisthub.
To make this easier, I've even made it possible to include code snippets in the blog posts. Below is just an example of course, there's about 262,273 more lines of code that make up Whisthub!
import Whisthub from 'whisthub';
const wh = new Whisthub();
wh.start();Staying up to date
Most blogs on the internet allow you to subscribe to updates by email or as an RSS feed. Both are possible with the Whisthub blog too. If you want to stay up to date via email, you can subscribe to updates on the blog index page. Everytime a new blog post is published, an email will be sent to the primary email address that is set in your account email settings. Of course you can unsubscribe from these emails at any time if you no longer want to receive them.
The timing of the emails also depends on the timing you subscribed: if you want to receive them in the morning during breakfast, then make sure to subscribe in the morning as well. If you want to receive them in the evening before you go to bed, then sign up for them in the evening! Note that this doesn't take into account Daylight Saving Time or anything, so if you want to change when they arrive, just unsubscribe and then resubscribe again at the appropriate time.
As mentioned, the blog is also available as an RSS feed on www.whisthub.com/blog/rss.xml. However, most RSS readers will automatically discover the rss feed if you just enter www.whisthub.com.
Alternatively you can also follow Whisthub on Facebook or X because announcements about new blog posts will be done there too. Of course you can also just regularly check out www.whisthub.com/blog!
Honestly I'm quite excited to start blogging! In the very near future I plan to write a blog post about the history of Whisthub, so stay tuned!