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Journal Short Circuit's Journal: Need to Move 8

Journal by Short Circuit

I need to move my RPG discussions off Slashdot. Here are my reasons (in no decipherable order):

First, I've got five discussion topics waiting to be posted. (I email them to myself at my gmail account, as a sort of draft from, before I post them here.) And that number grows as people email me, and as I think of things while reading other RPG material.

Second, I can only link to one at a time from my signature. Then I spend hours commenting in the front page articles in order to advertise this material. (Not that I wouldn't spend hours reading anyway...it's just that some days, I don't feel like I have anything useful to say.) Maintaining a separate page pointing to my discussions has proved difficult.

Third, In order to make sure each article gets some activity, I don't post new topics immediately when they come to mind. This is because I can only have so many active journal entries before they get archived. And journal entries without that "RPG: ..." banner (like this one) count towards that limit.

Fourth, I'd like to expand this as a project. I'm only familiar with D&D. Yet there's plenty of people out there who have things to say, questions to ask, and stories to tell, about other RPG systems. For this reason, I'd like to involve more than just myself. Obviously, my Slashdot journal can't be posted to by two people.

Fifth, I'd like to expand readership, but a Slashdot user journal isn't very image-customizable or even very impressive. (Even if the commenting mechenism is awesome.) Having only a Slashdot sig as advertisement certainly scores hits (I've still got a warm fuzzy feeling over the response to the article I posted yesterday.), but the URL is a lot harder to transmit by word-of-mouth. (I am curious if I'm getting any of that sort of advertisement, though. :)

Some issues:

My skills at webmastering are lackluster at best. My familiarity with web-based Perl programming is unproven. And I haven't recently tried working as a team. (Though I imagine roleplayers are pretty good at that. :)

If you have any suggestions, thoughts, comments, or (timidly)offers of help(/timidly), feel free to post them. Or, if you'd prefer, email me.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

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  • I'll continue reading, but just so you know, when I tried branching away from slashdot, it simply didn't work well. You'll lose 50-80% of your slashdot readership within a week. People don't like to add another page to their daily reading unless its updated very often (several times a day). You'll have to look for readership in lots of places to stay popular.

    But on the other side, I am a java developer and can help you in many ways (though I don't have much time to really work on anything else). Heck,
    • With the minor caveat that rss feeds are much more popular than they used to be, and many people have readers and aggregators. If you go elsewhere, make sure you get a feed. And link to the front page of your new site in your /. entries, and continue to mine the dot for commenters.

      Also, aren't there some rpg sites where you could become a presence? Any point to a new site?
      • Also, aren't there some rpg sites where you could become a presence? Any point to a new site?

        Sure [google.com].

        There are many of them. Unfortunately, a lot of them have horrible spelling and grammar habits. Most of them use phpBB, which has a posting/reply mechanism that's altogether too flat for my tastes. (I guess I get that from spending too much time on Slashdot for way too long.)

        Heh...If I do start my own board of sorts, the tagline will be, "For the (wannabe) Sophisticated Gamer", or something like that.
    • Heck, you could always start up your own slash site using slashcode.

      I'd really like a slashcode site, but they're a RPTIA to set up. There's a Linux Journal article on the subject, but it's currently subscribers-only.

      As for maintaining contact with Slashdot readers, I'll frequently put article links in my journal on Slashdot. Something like a daily list, but containing artiles posted the previous day. (I can't imagine coming up with enough stuff to "push data off the front page" at the rate Slashdot do
      • You could always start a PHP-Nuke site. PHP-Nuke is basically slash done in PHP (there are some other differences, but who cares for now). I won't say it is the greatest solution, but you can get hosted for $5 a month [vortexhost.com] and that was just a quick google search. It's also much easer to set up than Slash- even if you are hosting on your own machine.
  • Try to post a link to new discussions as a journal entry on a regular basis. I use /my/amigos to read journals and if you did that it would be very easy for me to use your new site. I wouldn't have to remember to bookmark it or check it that way.
  • check out Wordpress.org it's an easily customizable blog that'd work well for your format, I think.
    • I'm looking at it. I'm working on getting it set up on a friend's machine, so I can give it a try. I'll immediately post a journal entry if/when that happens.

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