Why and How to Blog on Itch

Enough people have been surprised to see our recent blog posts being hosted on itch.io that it seemed worthwhile to write up an overview on how the experience has gone and generally why we’re doing this. Also we didn't see any overview on how to use itch as a dedicated blogging platform, so we figured it was useful to put everything in one place for what worked, what didn't, and where your RSS link is hiding.

Why Blog on Itch?

We migrated our blog to itch because our own site's equivalent was missing some basic features (most notably comments and an RSS feed). We already use itch extensively for digital copies of our games, and after trawling the support forums confirmed that using project devlog as our new general-purpose blogging platform would do everything we needed.

Ultimately, itch expects that you are posting in service of a project (probably an indie video game). It's not really intended for standalone blogging. This isn't really a problem though, and leads to a lot of really interesting features available to your blog that you may not strictly need but are either good, weird, or both. Examples include:

On the whole if you're already publishing on itch.io and you don't already have a blog (or the blog you do have isn't very good), using itch is pretty solid! It just takes a little setup to create a space for posts that aren't necessarily about a specific game/project/whatever.

How to set up a standalone blog using itch.io

Getting Itch up and running as a blogging platform was a little counter-intuitive. You can, in point of fact, author blog posts without a project associated with them. However, when you do so they functionally disappear - there’s no centralized location to find all your project-free posts and therefore no way to generate an RSS feed or place to point anyone to. So, the blog must become a Project unto itself.

Ok but how do you set up a project?

The normal way.

Once you've spun up a project and written your first post, everything kind of takes care of itself. You're automatically given an RSS feed, and posts show up in order on the project and devlog pages. Not ideal if you want more

Where’s my RSS Feed?

Ok so that one’s is a little trickier: As soon as you have a devlog for a project, Itch automatically generates an RSS feed for it. You can get to the feed by just adding ".rss" to the end of the devlog page for your project.

For example, our devlog is at
https://gemroomgames.itch.io/the-gem-room-games-blog/devlog
so you can find our RSS feed at
https://gemroomgames.itch.io/the-gem-room-games-blog/devlog.rss
and you'll be able to find YOUR feed at
https://[itchaccount].itch.io/[project-name]/devlog.rss

Hope this helps!

If you do end up setting up a blog with itch let us know about it! Maybe there's a way to do webrings with collections or something. Maybe I'll do a follow up once I figure out Advanced Blogging Tricks on here. Happy blogging! I've written the word "blog" so many times its lost all meaning.

Blog.

Written by Dan. His computer froze while writing this so he had to write it twice. Normally he puts in fun stuff like the music he's listening to but he's late for work so byeeee. oh the picture's from old book illustrations but they didn't know who drew it, thanks whoever drew the cool electric pen picture.