Big Changes on the Way at AJF

Hey, everyone! Nothing Animal Jam related in this post, but I figured I should inform everyone on what will be coming up very soon here on the Feather. I am very proud to announce these changes and I hope to release them ASAP!

• HTTPS Support - Google's Blogger, with which the Feather is made, has announced that they may be helping blogs move to HTTPS. For those of you who are not familiar with it, HTTPS is much more secure than standard HTTP. It helps keep you safe and protected online. You can check to see if a site has this by simply looking in the upper right at the URL of the website. You will notice that many bigger sites, like Animal Jam and Google, have this feature. It is a very prized thing, but the amazing people at Blogger want to help everyone stay secure.

• Staff Biographies - Even though the staff currently only exists between MyFuzzyKins and myself, some friends of mine plan to become staff members next year after our mid-terms. With this, I hope to bring a staff listing page with some short bios about everyone who keeps this place going.

• More Contests - Many blogs host art and video contests for our lovely Animal Jam, but I plan to host contests to show off other talents. This could include singing, writing, and even things as exotic as AJ-needlepoints.

• Chat and Other Community Hangouts - I already have an account set up and the chat will be brought shortly. I also plan to do some other community hangouts, but that's something I'm keeping under my hat for the time.

• YouTube - The blog will soon have it's own YouTube account. However, I will need other staff members to do this since I have the blog to take care of. Do you want to do it? Look below, then.

• New Staff Positions - This is great news for anyone with some time on their hands. While I, as Administrator, have to keep this blog together and do a little bit of everything myself, I would love to have some helpers around the place. I will be looking for authors, videographers, artists, moderators, coders, and more! I plan to begin major hiring in mid-December.

• Update 11/19/15 9:14 PM EST: I have confirmed that the site has working cookies and alerts users under certain domains, as accordance to European Union law. Blogger has added this recently and has required a check for it, I have confirmed that we do get a neat little banner at the top, so any viewers under UK and FR domains will know that we use cookies. This is just another step toward internet safety. Next, we plan to be updated to the https I spoke of earlier. :)
• Update 11/19/15 9:24 PM EST: We are now available as an HTTPS connection! This is big news for all of our viewers! We are accessible through HTTP and HTTPS, so everyone can use whichever one you want. However, some gadgets may or may not be working right just yet. I do plan to fix this, and apparently I can. Take in this part of an article posted on the official Blogger blog:

... Once enabled, your blog will become accessible over both HTTP and HTTPS connections. Blogspot authors should be aware that if they choose to encrypt at this time, some of the current functionality of their blog may not work over HTTPS. This can be a result of template, gadgets, and blog post content, and is often caused by mixed content errors, some of which may be fixable by the author themselves. ...

... HTTPS is a cornerstone of internet security as it provides several important benefits: it makes it harder for bad actors to steal information or track the activities of blog authors and visitors, it helps check that visitors open the correct website and aren’t being redirected to a malicious location, and it helps detect if a bad actor tries to change any data sent from Blogger to a blog visitor.  ...

This is a big step on the HTTPS Everywhere mission and I would like to thank everyone down at Blogger for this update.

-Hurricane