I love this idea. It’s like wikipedia, but more focused and practical.

I hope it works out for you, but I would suggest that you should have a monetization strategy before you pour countless hours into a project. It’s always a good idea to have revenue potential Integrated into your design rather than tacked on.

Probably the most lucrative way would be indirect selling… I could enter into business as a consultant, specializing in the planning and testing phases, as well as a crack-team debugger, although I would not like to write the bulk of the code for a project… that would be outsourcing.
I could also run workshops and seminars on specific topics, giving people visual, hands-on education, rather than simply screen based. This would have a higher cost to set up, but it also has a higher payoff potential.

I would also like to start a school that pays for itself… Instead of charging tuition, we gain license on software that the students develop while attending class. This would give the students an education, a portfolio, and extensive advertising, together with products that give the students a residual income after they graduate. This site would be the foundation for that future school, if/when I decide to pursue this idea. (The better their education, the better their product, and the more money we make. The better our advertising, the more money the software makes, and the more money the students make… a classic win-win scenario.) Of course, this idea is at least a decade away.

Another method of monetizing the site would be to sell products directly… Such as software developed by me, or textbooks that go much further than the contents of the site. Of course, since I’ll be putting great information on the site, the textbooks would have to be even better… I’m not willing to lower the standards of the free information, so I would need to write premium textbooks.

I’m wondering… what revenue models (other than ads) could I integrate into a free reference site? Selling additional services, such as consulting or seminars, can’t be integrated directly… only advertised for. Selling software or books would be an additional section of the site, and could just as easily be a separate site entirely… I don’t want people to need to buy the Super-Nerdy content… the in-depth sections are just as important as hooks to get people to return as the main tutorials are.

… This is something to think about.

Perhaps I could sell access to the full source code of examples. The current plan is to show small sections of an example, only showing the lines that are important for that one section, then including a link to the full file or full project in case a person simply wants to copy-and-paste, instead of having to change their code incrementally as the tutorial goes on.

Buying access to the full example source code would not be required, if a person were following along with the tutorials, but if a person were skipping around, or didn’t yet have the context of the code down, then access to the source code would be a helpful premium feature. This would also tie in with premium features in the forums, such as the ability to upload and share their own files, where non-premium members would have all of the ‘basic’ abilities.