web publishing questions
I'm considering a web publishing project but I have no idea, so i'm looking for advice.
Specifically what I'm looking to do is to create a web-accessible rules reference for players in a role-playing game, for which the rules are pretty much out of print.
This will be geared towards "personal use" and I expect that as long as I avoid using trademarks or copying verbatim the text describing the rules from the original source, that I should be staying out of trouble in terms of IP infringement (far as I understand it, you can't copyright game mechanics - you can trademark the name of your game and copyright the text you've written explaining the rules, but the rules themselves are not copyrightable - though I suppose they may be patentable). I feel mostly secure that this is fair use but I do feel like it may be a gray area.
At any rate, i've got 2 questions:
1) if the purpose is to make this available to a small number of specific people (but there are few compelling reasons to restrict it), am I better off just creating a word document or some such and distributing that?
2) can anyone recommend *how* to get it out there? (i'm also not sure where would be a good place to put it, but that's a different question)
It's been years since I've written HTML-marked up text and uploaded it manually to my ISP's personal web space, but I assume we've come a long way from that.
I was thinking of making something wiki-based, which would allow:
* hyperlinked and cross-indexed document with seperate "articles" for each rule/topic
* relatively easy updates on the fly, and would allow multiple users (with access to the original books) to update entries
* users to post questions or requests for clarifications on the 'talk' pages
I don't know if there are other, better options though. I'm not looking to do anything slick or fancy here, just to get some information out there with a minimum of fuss. It's possible that my best option is just to type up a low-tech txt or word file and mail it.
Specifically what I'm looking to do is to create a web-accessible rules reference for players in a role-playing game, for which the rules are pretty much out of print.
This will be geared towards "personal use" and I expect that as long as I avoid using trademarks or copying verbatim the text describing the rules from the original source, that I should be staying out of trouble in terms of IP infringement (far as I understand it, you can't copyright game mechanics - you can trademark the name of your game and copyright the text you've written explaining the rules, but the rules themselves are not copyrightable - though I suppose they may be patentable). I feel mostly secure that this is fair use but I do feel like it may be a gray area.
At any rate, i've got 2 questions:
1) if the purpose is to make this available to a small number of specific people (but there are few compelling reasons to restrict it), am I better off just creating a word document or some such and distributing that?
2) can anyone recommend *how* to get it out there? (i'm also not sure where would be a good place to put it, but that's a different question)
It's been years since I've written HTML-marked up text and uploaded it manually to my ISP's personal web space, but I assume we've come a long way from that.
I was thinking of making something wiki-based, which would allow:
* hyperlinked and cross-indexed document with seperate "articles" for each rule/topic
* relatively easy updates on the fly, and would allow multiple users (with access to the original books) to update entries
* users to post questions or requests for clarifications on the 'talk' pages
I don't know if there are other, better options though. I'm not looking to do anything slick or fancy here, just to get some information out there with a minimum of fuss. It's possible that my best option is just to type up a low-tech txt or word file and mail it.