24.5. A Website of Its Own

| Chapter 24: Publishing |

| 24.5. A Website of Its Own

While any good story file ought to go into the IF Archive, it's probably wise also to provide an easier-to-use home for the work, by putting up a web page and a copy of the story file on a private web host. That host should ideally be as stable as possible, so that the URL is likely to remain fixed for what might be a long period. Freeware games have a long period of viability relative to commercial games, which means that players may still be hearing about and checking out a game years after its initial release. A stable address helps everyone with links, and makes it easier for Google to direct people.

Of course creating a web page involves a little design work, but tools are widely available which make this quite easy nowadays. And as we've seen, Inform can automatically generate web pages and even small mini-sites to put all the information about a story file into a tidy format.

More ambitious web pages might even offer the game in a form which people can play directly through a browser. This is especially important for works meant for players who are not part of the hard-core IF community (and who therefore might be confused by a two-step interpreter-and-game-download process). There are several browser-based interpreters available, both in Java and in Flash; the state of the art changes rapidly. A good place to look for information on the latest interpreters is the ifwiki:

> http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Category:Interpreter

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