Disclaimer: The following post may go over your head if you are not a computer person. I assume no responsibility for any confusion this post may cause you. ;-)
In late December, a friend of mine gave me an old computer he was about to throw out. I couldn't really think of much use for it, until I thought about installing Linux (a free, open-source alternative to Windows or Mac). I downloaded Fedora Core 6 (the version of Linux I decided to try out), and got it all working on the computer.
Thinking about what I could do with it, I decided to turn the computer into a small server. After getting Apache and PHP with MySQL and an FTP server installed, I tried sticking a page up on the server, and it worked! Well, it only worked inside our home network with all the computers.
After looking around a bit, I found some services that let you have a subdomain with a dynamic IP address.
Fast forward a month, lots of hours researching, and lots of editing some PHP pages, and I can now host pretty much anything thrown at me. Including whole iTunes music libraries, and have it streamed right to any internet-connected computer, thus freeing up a few gigs on your hard drive.
I also built a database driven site for a sign-up service for our church. For a long time the elders had to call or email each other to decide who got what job in serving communion on communion Sundays. After tinkering a bit with PHP and MySQL, I made a sign up sheet for them, so now all they have to do is go to that website, and enter their name where they want to sign up! Its actually quite fun building all the pages and getting everything to work!
So, that's been my project for the past few months...
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