RPGist Blog

The RPGist's D&D 5e Spellcaster Helper has a new address: https://dnd5spells.rpgist.net

But don't worry about remembering the new path, carry on using the old one and you will be automatically redirected.

One side effect is that the ads stopped working until the advertising program approves the new domain. It should be working again soon.

It is not much of a change, the only difference is that there is no more dot between the "dnd5" and the "spells". Also, when you change the language of the site to Portuguese, for example, using the language selector in the page footer, instead of being sent to https://en.dnd5.spells.rpgist.net, you will end up at https://dnd5spells.rpgist.net/en.

The main change was in the way of determining in which language the site is loaded by URL. It is important that this distinction exists in the URL

• so that Google can show the site in the search results in the appropriate language for the speakers of each language and direct them to a URL where the site will be in that same language
• so you can control the language of a sharing snippet on Fabook or Twitter, for example, according to the target audience of the sharing

The Spellcaster Helper, in its root URL (without "en" or "pt-BR" at the address), choses in which language to be loaded according to the user's preferred language on their browser. This means that the content of the page in https://dnd5spells.rpgist.net sometimes will be in Portuguese and sometimes in English. Without the "en" or "pt-BR" on the routes, the Google, Facebook and Twitter robots cannot know the language of the site.

The main reasons for the change are:

• the URL was too long and difficult to remember, and was only made as it was because of the difficulty I had at the time in making it as it is now
• Google Search Console separates properties by subdomain, so with a subdomain for each language, you are required to create and manage a property for each language the site supports and view its statistics in isolation
• the SSL certificate used in the Google Cloud VM to which the Spellcaster Helper will be moved soon only supports one level of subdomains and "en.dnd5.spells.rpgist.net" has three

With this change, we're one step closer to being able to move the Spellcaster Helper to the VM where the other RPGist apps are, and free ourselves from the higher costs of hosting the apps on Heroku. There are a few more steps to take yet. I'll keep your guys posted.