So, you wanted to keep track of your fictional characters that you’ve licensed under a Creative Commons license. But you have no place to list them. It’s possible to launch a repository for your fictional characters. There are 2 methods of launching your fictional characters repository. And I’ll show you how to launch it.
Contents
- All You Need
- If you currently have a website (self-hosted)
- Preparing your characters for your repository
- If you were using hosted sites.
All You Need:
If you currently have your own website (self-hosted)
If you already have a website, you can create a digital repository for your fictional characters what you licensed freely for anyone who contributed to open-source projects, or CC-licensed projects. It’s always a good idea to setup a subsite for your characters, you can set it up as a wiki for example; wiki.yoursite.com, or characters.yoursite.com. Check with your web-hosting provider if setting up subsites is possible. If you can set them up; you are ready to get your repository started. If you’re a WordPress user, you can setup a network of sites.
To setup subdomains; follow these steps:
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Log into your hosting account. Web-hosts may vary from company to company.
If you don’t have an account yet, create one at your desired hosting company you may want to use.
Go to your control panel… for example; CPanel; go to your desired domain you want to use.
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Edit your wp-config.php file. You need to edit this file, otherwise it will not work, be sure to download a backup copy just incase.
Refresh your other browser displaying your site. And set it aside. Be sure to follow these instructions, you might need to edit your .htaccess file., and edit your wp-config file again.
Follow the online instructions, and choose subdomains,–depending on how old is your install of WordPress is. You can’t set both subdomains, and subdirectories on one install of wordpress. But you can setup a secondary install of WordPress if you want.
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Navigate to subdomains, and create a wild card subdomain. Type *, and save your subdomain. You need to set this one up because, that helps your subdomains work correctly.
Log out of your control panel, and your hosting account.
Troubleshooting
I’ve already setup subdomains, but I kept getting errors, what to do?
What’s mentioned above, you need to create a subdomain, *.example.com at your control panel in order for this to work. Be sure to check with your web-host for more information.
Preparing your characters for your repository
Review your content first… Choose which characters to include in your repository, or include all. Take some time, and research if you can keep track of your own characters.
Before you ever begin, edit and backup your entire set of characters what you’ve created when writing books, movies, TV shows, plays, etc. If you already did this; follow these steps:
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Go to your WordPress dashboard, go to My Sites, and activate the Add New link, or button. It will take you to the wizard to enable you to create a subdomain of your site. Be sure to give your site a name, if you want your characters to be placed there as a repository. Once you’re done creating a new site, set it up.
Slowly insert each post of your characters. Always publish each post of your character what you’re including. For example; your characters were rabbit types, you can apply a tag or category.
Review what’re actually publishing to your repository. Check if your fictional characters were assigned to each post, don’t just put all eggs in just 1 basket. Each character needs to published on it’s own post. Images are optional.
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When Assigning a Category; be sure to give your character a certain type, whether if it’s a mouse type, rabbit type, etc. Describe each category,–so your visitors who visit your repository can know about your characters easily. This can take some time. Be sure if your description is totally detailed.
Use tags to tag your characters.
Use the Creative Commons Configurator plugin to configure Creative Commons licenses, be sure to set it to BY-SA 4.0. That works the best for your character repository. This is important if you have characters in the public domain.
If you have trouble implementing Creative Commons licenses manually, or with a plugin, most likely, your plugins, or website is outdated. Be sure to update it. And varify if your plugins were up to date too.
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Publish, and launch your repository. Be sure to check if your entire site is running like it should.
To protect yourself, and your repository; implement a Terms Of Use page for your repository,–especially if you have users who were using your repository for their characters. That way; if any corporation tries to claim trademark of your characters as theirs, these corporations will NOT claim trademark, or copyright of your characters. You can implement a multi-section terms page.
Always implement a Privacy Policy Page on your repository’s site, that’s important for safety for your visitors, and users.
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Continue each cycle of publishing new posts that corrosponds with your characters. Update them if necessary. Whether is any of the following:
- You are writing new content that focuses on your character’s story,–such as a book, or a movie.
- Art projects.
- Contributors who reused your characters for their projects.
- Toy manufacturing.
- costume developing.
Turn on manual excerpts to display custom summaries. That works the best for some of your characters that need extra info.
If you want anyone to support your repository
You can enable advertisers to advertise on your repository by setting up ad spaces, or you can implement a donate button to allow donors to support your site.
You can also implement paywalls,–so your members can support your site too. This is useful if you wanted to offer premium content, and go ad-free.
If you were using hosted sites
Always have a backup copies of your content that is HTML-based, along with your other content. Be sure to backup all of them to your server, and always check if your hosted site is capable of handling high content volume. Check with your site administrator if you can publish a high volume repository.
You can still accomplish setting up your character repository by either using a hosted wiki. Alternatively, you can publish hard copies of your books as a repository. But watch out for these copyright trolls, and trademark trolls,–and also patent trolls! These intellectual troublemakers were gaming the system for the past years.
For Google Sites Users
Go to sites.google.com, and create a new site. Give your repository a name, and implement a Creative Commons license manually. It may be tricky to create your repository like this because, limitations can cause you to use up your disk space. For this reason, hosting your photoes outside of Google Sites is needed.
If you’ve managed to run your repository, you can host it for a while,–until you’re satisfied to host your own site in the future.
Why can’t I build my character repository on Blogger?
Some Blogger blogs with informative content were susceptible to suddden deletion,–resulting to a total loss of your valuable content, and there’s too much limitations.
If you have extreme concerns; try using self-hosted WordPress instead. That works the best for publishing character repositories.
If you were starting off with a hosted blog as your repository, be sure to draft extremely long posts before publishing. Try to write as much text as you can. At least 1000 words works the best for all power bloggers who were skilled at writing posts. Try doing the following to keep yourself safe:
- Avoid publishing adult content for erotic fictional characters, instead, you should implement a paywall,–so minors won’t see any of your erotic content. Be sure to keep all erotic content away from hosted blogs.
- Be careful with advertisements!
- Be careful not to overuse tags or labels on your hosted blog, otherwise; it will be a splog!
- If for some reason, your blog takes too long to load, your hosted blog is under maintenance, or a denial of service attack has occured. Be sure to check with your administrator to varify if they are doing their job to fix the problem. Denial of service attacks can be scary! Even webmasters get scared sometimes.
- Since Blogger only allow us to have a max of 100 blogs; that’s the countermeasure to prevent spammers from flooding their service by creating splogs.
