Who am i?
Well to start off who am I? I am a System Administrator that enjoys programming in PHP. Some day I hope to change that and say am a PHP programmer/developer or what ever the proper term is. I have been programming in PHP off and on for 13 years now, so my programming skills shouldn't be much of a question.
I am also a gamer. Now I know the first thing you think about when I say "i am a gamer" is Video Games. To be honest I don't play too many of those, just don't have the time with all of my hobbies. Now I am not a gamer that lives night and day gaming, I would consider myself a casual gamer. I like to play for the sake of playing. I don't monitor a lot of forums as I am too busy keeping up with the programming world. Though I am sure if this takes off that will probably change.
So if I am not a Video Gamer what are you then, I am sure you are asking. I play more of the tabletop, board, role-playing and card variety of games. I enjoy the likes of Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Hordes and Dungeons and Dragons. I am sure there are a few gaming companies that might come after me for what I am about to build. But, they should understand this is meant for the community at large not to fill their pocket books and what I build is to help them and the community in the long run.
Why this?
In order to understand the question "Why this?" you need to understand what I am planning to build. What I am trying to build is a community site for gamers so that they can find other gamers in their area to game with. That is the basic premise to what I want to build. So you are probably saying isn't there sites out there for that? Yes and no, from what I have been able to research some companies have tried to build something like this for their own products. Which is great, but limiting, they really need to include what game stores provide which is for more than one company. But you are saying there are some out there for role-playing and board games I am sure of it. Yes there are ones out for that as well, but again they are limiting their potential there are so many other types of games out there. Granted I will probably be limiting mine as well by not including Video Games, but that could change. And don't worry game stores and groups, I am hoping to give you guys some tools to work with your fellow communities.
So to get to the "Why this?" question, let me tell a story. About 11 years ago I moved to a city where I did know very well and didn't know anyone, except a few co-workers. A couple of years working in that city a co-worker got me started in my gaming career with the local gaming group. Life was good and got to know some really great people and accumulated a large enough gaming collection that I really didn't want to give up. I learned a lot from those people and to this day I miss playing with them, which I try to do when I can get away.
Fast forward to about 3 years ago, the company that moved to the new city gets bought out by a company that decides to move me back to my prior location. Now I never heard of most of the games that I learned over the previous years before moving to that new city. So when I moved back I found no gaming store or community that played any of the games that I had been playing for the prior years. It was kind of depressing and being the kind of programmer I am I wanted to build a "social" site for people in my position. I was looking for other gamers to play the games that I was playing.
Unfortunately at the time I had an idea of what I wanted to build, but there were some responsibility and other questions that I had about building such a site. I still haven't answered a lot of those questions still, and hope to answer them as I go. A few months ago I started to feel I needed to do something to change my life so on my birthday I ordered the domains that I found weren't used by other people and was related to what I wanted to do. Sorry could not come up with some clever site name(not a lack for trying), that some search giants or social sites have. But, it should do for this experiment in social networking.
Now to warn you this is a part time project of mine. I still work at a job, and technically it isn't a business, at least not yet. Though I hope some of this changes. I will probably have ads on the site, to offset some of the costs and maybe even charge for something down the road who knows. But my goals are to help the gaming community the way I think I know how. Provide tools for gamers, groups and stores to help build a community and find gamers they like to play against. So I hope you enjoy and if you want to give feed back I have setup a few social pages which I have "like" links in the bottom of this page.
So now it is off to start building this vapor-ware that I just promoted. I will try to post here on my progress and I will put links to the blog posts on the social pages as well.
Thanks for your interest, and let the fun begin...