<a href=”http://6sided.net/members/jazbo/gallery/my-galleries/15mm-punic-wars/gods-of-war-015″><img src=”http://6sided.net/wp-content/uploads/gallery/user/375/4/gods-of-war-015-600×450.jpg” alt=”gods of war 015″ /></a>
Revamp of 6Sided site underway
We have finally gotten around to taking the 6Sided site to “the next level” in terms of clarity and design. You will now see that the front page at http://6sided.net contains clear paths for each of our wargaming services – blogs, directory and download store.
This is the first of several bits of work we are completing before the new year. Next is an upgrade of all plugins and extra features, both in user blogs and those that run the main sites functionality.
After that we will be putting the finishing touches to another service that we will be launching soon. More on that as it happens, but suffice to say we are excited as nothing else like it exists for wargamers!
Jaz & Ian
Advertise Here - Click To Find Out More
New Blog Directory Open
We have launched our new blog directory.
Up until now we have had an internal blog directory, meaning we only listed 6sided blogs. This can still be found by following the “blogs” link at the top of the homepage.
But we wanted to give all gaming bloggers a chance to list their blogs, and to build a valuable gaming resource. We want to be the “experts” for gaming blogs, both in provision of blogs and listing them. So our new blog directory allows people to submit a listing regardless of where their blog is hosted.
You can find the new general blog directory and submit your listing here:
http://directory.6sided.net/
Please bear with us, as we have been inundated with submissions and have a backlog to go through and authorise, so it could be a few days before your listing appears.
6Sided Download Store: New Product Available
Just a quick update to announce that the new “Song Of Arthur & Merlin”, a standalone game based on the previous supplement of the same name is available in our download store, priced $8.
Click here to visit our wargames rules download store.
Upload Space Increased
We have been doing some fine-tuning on the servers this week. While doing so, we found that a stats program called “awstats” that had been activated for a project we did two years ago was still running. The stats files it had stored amounted to more than 3GB of space!
We deleted those log files and have decided to give that space to the 6sided membed blogs.
So from today, free blogs have 100Mb of upload space, and supporter blogs have 200Mb.
As resources are being used as an increasing rate, please consider upgrading your blog to supporter to give us a hand. It costs a measly $10 per year, and for that you get one of the most powerful blogs on the internet, in a dedicated gaming envirmonment.
Wow that’s a LOT of traffic!
It has been just three months since we launched. In that short time more than 250 people have started blogs with us.
We are very pleased, and shocked to be honest, that in July we hit an amzing total. The below figures are the totals for the entire network:
Pageviews: 274,000
Unique Visits: 107,000
That is an astonishing couple of stats! We have worked hard to promote 6Sided, and to make sure that your blogs get indexed by Google quickly. This work coupled with the great content our members are providing, means that people are flocking to read 6sided blogs!
If you are on Blogspot (blogger.com) you can import your existing blog content in minutes.
Come over to the dark side.
GREAT new plugin added to 6Sided blogs!
This is great news for 6Sided blog owners. This is a plugin you can activate in your blog and without any intervention from you it will improve the links between the posts on your blog, it will increase the time people spend reading your blog AND it will improve your Search Engine relevance!
Wow! So what is it???
It is called YAARP. This stands for Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. What it does is simple. It uses an algorithm, that behind the scenes looks at the content of a page of your blog and then adds suggestions for related content on your blog, which it displays underneath your content as links:
So how will this help your wargaming blog?
When people find your content through searching on Google, they are looking for specific information, about a period, genre, company etc. So if they are presented with a set of links under the content that leads them to related content on your site, this means that they do not have to surf around your wargaming blog looking for the info. It also means they are more likely to click a link to read the content rather than going straight back to Google. So it aids visitor retention.
It will also aid the internal linking of your blog, which is good for Google finding new content and also for internal links building the strength of your overall optimisation for search engines.
This is a GREAT plugin. Simply go into your plugins page and activate it. That’s it! If you don’t want to change any settings then don’t. It searches your blog every time a post loads so it continually finds the most relevant related posts based upon the relevance algorithm in the plugin.
Hands off SEO, hands off traffic retention, hands off internal link strengthening.
We strongly recommend everyone uses this plugin!
Hey, look down…its suggested some related posts for you right here!
6sided is FASTER – have you noticed??
We did quite a bit of work early this week, upgrading wordpress (the software that runs the main site and all the member blogs), updating themes, plugins and help files. After a few issues (new signups could not view their blogs unless they chose another theme than the default theme), all is good (hopefully!)
The big new thing we did was move to a smaller, faster caching program, for the entire site network. Initial testing seems to show that all the blogs are loading lightning fast – we did some speed tests comparing some members blog loading times with some gaming blogs hosted on blogspot (blogger) and the 6sided blogs blew them out of the water!
6sided wargaming blogs – more features, more support, more traffic (big news on that soon) and faster, than blogspot. Spread the word 
How to update your 6sided blog from your mobile (cell) phone
We have just updated the FAQs to explain how you can add posts to your 6sided blog from you mobile phone. Great for taking photo’s at the club and uploading them for the world to see “as it happens” !
Payments to authors for June sent
We have just paid authors for June, for sales from the download store (authors reaching the threshold for minimum payout). Thank you to them and customers for helpin to fund this growing network.
If you sell pdf products, people are making money through 6sided – why aren’t you??
Click here to find out how you can get your products into the 6sided wargaming downloads store.
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