Making an Honest-to-God Actual Website

That's what I've been doing lately, setting up a real, paid-for, domain-registered website.

Not for me, of course - or rather, not just for me.

See, my friends and I, we're gamers. I know I must have mentioned this once or twice or a million times, we are huge nerds and this is what we do. We have a game that's been running for over two years now (I remember the excitement of showing off my engagement ring while we sat down and prepared for the superhero game), and a game that is very recently started. We meet two nights a week, as a rule, though of course school and work and life make their intrusions. We have a set of forums that we've used for a couple of years for things like arranging gatherings, sharing funny stories and interesting news items, and incidental interaction (incidental meaning nothing you need dice for) between characters. It's a good system, and one that we like, but in the years that we've had it, the hosting site has often crashed for weeks at a time, leaving us with little recourse.

So I bought a website. And a year of hosting. As a lump, it was a little painful on the wallet, but it came down to less than $10 per person per year, for registering the domain, getting things set up, and all the hosting, and that's a hard deal to beat. I'm wanting to say it was something like $5/month for hosting?

I used JustHost.com, which offers unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, and was very well reviewed. So far I haven't had it for terribly long, but I'm liking it. I set up new forums right off the bat, and Pitt Beau will be showing me how to move over all our previous posts in some kind of an easy manner, so that we don't lose our years and years of forum history. I set up subdomains and ftp accounts for everyone in the group, so that everyone has their own corner of the site to fuck with as they please, and nobody (danny) has to worry (danny) about anyone else (me) messing with their content (danny), even if only as a prank. Which, knowing our group, we would do in a heartbeat were it an option. I mean, hell, I would do it myself.

So now things are slowing down on that. I still need to make some html templates for me, and for folks who aren't terribly familiar with html, to use. I still need to set up some kind of a contact list that not-us people won't have access to, and perhaps a chat room, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

Perhaps at a later date I'll post a link to the site, but for now I think I'll leave it be. I want to see it grow into an awesome online encyclopedia of our games, because I am just arrogant enough to think that they're really something special, even in the wonderful world of gaming.

I mean, where else are you going to find an ex-government-experiment ward of the state superhero whose power is that she talks to rats, and can locate objects or people through her "cheese sense"? That level of awesome doesn't just grown on trees, you know.