I just put a new article up at Lazarus Notes that I think is directly relevant to people publishing on the Internet.

The article, "How Not to Publish a Product," is based on my experiences trying to install a Java Servlet engine (a cool geek toy that most people will never need or want to know about). The tools I'm installing are supposedly free, but I found more than a few hurdles in my way. The hurdles were sufficiently daunting that I'm turned off on this product, and it's my intent never to recommend it for a client.

Game publishers are also companies, and have similar drives to software companies. There's a desire to know who's using your product, and to keep people from ripping you off. Sometimes satisfying these desires puts an unacceptable hurdle in the way of your customer though.

Ron's old model for delivery of the Sorcerer PDFs was an example of how to do it. Your e-mail address was entered as part of the payment process. The processor passed that on to Ron so he could deliver the product. His desire to know who was using the product was satisfied, the customer wasn't inconvenienced, and everybody was happy at the end of the day.

Another game which I found early into my indie-rpg adventures took the approach that I stumbled on in my article. The product was "free," but I had to click through about three screens and fill out a form before you got the free product. If something went wrong with the download, you had to click through them all again.

I don't know how widespread this process is, but as people are discussing how to prevent piracy of their games on here, it's something to think about.

I'm sorry you had such a negative experience with it. Our page is Java (JSP) running under RedHat. It took a little tinkering in, but we're very happy with it.

http://jagsgame.dyndns.org/jags/index.jsp

The database is PostgreSQL (chosen over MySQL so that the page could cache on updates with a trigger). It's all custom code with a back-end content management system. The Jive Forums are a bit primitive, I guess. But as I said over all we're very proud of it. And it's all Java.
-Marco

Marco,

That's a really beautiful site. I'm glad to hear that you had a little more luck with JSP. I did my installation through FreeBSD ports, which is by and large a very painless way to install anything - the latest version is downloaded, all dependencies are automatically built, and everything about install is handled smoothly. Jakarta/Tomcat and Cocoon on FreeBSD seem to have been assembled from spare football bats. This might explain why FreeBSD is strong in the web hosting world (Apache, PHP and MySQL are easy installs), but Linux holds sway in the JSP world.