My WarEngine Wiki

I've tackled a new project. I'm taking my WarEngine wargaming system and putting it in the hands of the community of wargamers in the form of a WarEngine Wiki. I signed up for a cheap hosting account that supports PHP5 and MySQL and installed the latest version of the free MediaWiki, the same software used to run Wikipedia. I've added some built-in Google AdSense banners and a donation page as a way to try making the service at least pay for itself and perhaps even generate some passive income.

I've also seeded the site with some content, including the Shock Force setting I developed when I was publishing wargames as DemonBlade Games. By putting all this in a wiki, I'm hoping that the community will then add to it. I've dropped $25 on a month's worth of ads on The Miniatures Page to drive some traffic to the site, too.

This has some similarity to writing to a "monetized" blog site, but I think it has some nice potential from the perspective that I don't necessarily have to (and if it works, shouldn't) provide all the content. I only launched it last week, so it's too early to tell, but if nothing else, it will be a good experiment in whether hosting and building an online community of this sort can be a profitable commercial endeavor, too.