Monday, August 13, 2007

New Wiki For Free Games Launched!

Hello readers and visitors! Today I announced the public launch of a new wiki called libregamewiki.

It is an encyclopedia on Free games and the Free gaming world.

Why I created this wiki? Well, I decided that the Free gaming world need a dedicated wiki of its own. It is not going to be about Linux gaming, but the whole Free gaming world! Plus it would be nice to know what the gameplay is like, what is the storyline, who written it, what license it is under, and more such information.

Plus it help with my ambition of creating making a Free gaming community(I never told you this before I think) and help make Free gaming become a major force in not only the Free software community but the gaming culture in general.

It is a place for Free gamer diehard who want to encounter ONLY Free games. That's right! NO PROPRIETARY GAMES!


It is going to be a place where people can gain lot of knowledge about Free games. It is going to be a place where people go to find new information about Free gaming, their hackers, and their contributions.

I already seeded a few articles there and there. In one case, an anonymous contributor already contributed an article. There are more articles to write too.

But the amount of articles is too small to be a useful resource and it need your help. We need your articles, your knowledge, your time, your expertise and your contributions.

If you're compassionate about Free gaming, please help us....

Help us make this wiki the comprehensive resource and encyclopedia for Free gaming in the world! <--- That's our goal. That is the end of my begging. I hope you guys contribute. Thanks for the audience that you granted me! Happy hacking! ~Kiba UPDATE: An anonymous user told me via the wiki that the new wiki is empty. No it isn't! For demonstration of non-emptiness, see the Battle for Wesnoth article I created.


UPDATE FOR A LITTLE NOTE:
I briefly changed policy and update this post to allowed games with source code Free but not contents but then I revert it. Now the old policy is back. Very strict but that will keep the game entries to be made of only Free games and prevent the wiki from expanding its coverage to proprietary games.

I registered a domain name for the wiki very recently.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

My Blogging Experience So Far: 10 Things I Learned

It been only a few months since I started blogging. Indeed I learn a lot in that time too. I also applied my knowledge that I gained from blogs about making money and articles on blogging. A lot of them are indeed true. I also learned a few things along the way too. I am not an expert though, but I did have some modest success(if you count thousand of visits last month modest).

Before I talked about what I learned about blogging, I discuss some potential benefit for game developers that come from blogging.

Potential rewards of blogging for game developers:

1. Additional traffic source for your projects. If they're interested in what you have to say, you probably have your own market for your games and new starting points for new websites you're going to develop. For example, when I launch that game devlog, all the new traffic come from this blog, even if it is very small. I have yet to try announcing my games here.

2. Reputation and ego gratification. You'll be a little bit more known to the community. If you got nice traffic boosts for articles you written, that will gratify your ego, too. When people say they like your blog, you know that you done a good job. Plus, they're more likely to pay attention to whatever new projects you're going to do.

3. Extra revenue source. Yet another revenue source for your game business means that if you lose one revenue source, you will still be making money with another website.

So what I learned about blogging?

1. It is very easy to make a profit if you know what you're doing. Ingredients required: free(as in free beers) host that allowed you to put up ads(blogger), some good contents, a source of traffic, and some ads, then BAM! You make money, even if it is mere cents. Your website become profitable just like that!

2. The difficulty is actually scaling the profits. In general, the higher your traffic, the bigger the profits. I see this happen whenever I got a traffic spike. I noticed it the most with projectwonderful ads and way less with Google Adsense but it still happen.

3. Resource articles are easiest to write and easy to promote(like this one). All you need to do is get links for a specific type of resource or make a list of what you know.

4. Sometime an article is indeed worth publishing even if you don't think so and vice versa. For example, my article about ideas on making money off Free softwares.

5. You do not need to spend money to make money with the exception of a computer and an internet connection. You could make money from blogging at public computers, though. I never spent a dime on this blog and on another website so far.

6. Put action items such as "vote for me at blahblah" at the end of your article. It'll help. This help me whenever I submitted an article to FSDaily.

7. There are lot of opportunities in the world. Learn to spot it and pursue it. For example, I got all the articles I ever submitted to FSDaily.com once I discovered that site. Each time, I got a nice decent boost for the size of my blog. If I wasn't a lazy bum in discovering new opportunities and exploiting them, this blog would be even more popular.

8. You can indeed be a lazy bum for days while still making money. This blog is a prime example. I didn't post for a few days, and I still make money.

9. People in your niche can be your best allies. For example, the Freegamer blog gives me nice traffic boost at various point of time.

10. Sometime, you can fill an unexpected really tiny niche. For example, my tutorial series apparently got lot of search engine results from people looking for Rubygame tutorials. I was not expecting that at all. I was expecting that people are not interested in Rubygame at all considering the really small size of the Rubygame community.

I hope this information will help some Free game developers, especially those that actually spend time on blogging.

Happy hacking!

~Kiba

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