Just came across this – Drupal Gardens - http://www.drupalgardens.com/ Like Ning, but using Drupal. More like WordPress.com really, but using Drupal. Many people have a free website for their personal blog or business. Generally they opt for WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, Google Sites or just make do with a Facebook page these days. Drupal is an open source content management system that is very popular amongst web developers as it is easy to install, easy to learn and highly configurable. Like WordPress.org, you can bolt on modules (like plugins, add-ons etc) to enhance the site. If installed on your own domain it is a very powerful CMS. With Drupal Gardens there is a choice of themes, all the usual Drupal features – pages, stories, forum, plus gallery and comments. At the moment you cannot install extra modules. It seems a good place to build a free site, if you are into that sort of thing. I set up an experimental blog here: http://howtoloseweight.drupalgardens.com/ It took me about 30 minutes to set that up, although most of the time was spent writing the first blog post (and yes, I know that it has not been proof read and is full of grammatical errors). In fact, I wrote a [...]

As part of my ongoing self education of the internet and computers in general, I have just installed the open source operating system, Linux, onto my old Athlon 1Ghz pc. I chose Ubuntu (version 7.04) as I was advised that it is a very “newbie” friendly distribution. It was a breeze to install, there were no hardware issues, even though the pc is about 6 years old, and comes with the Firefox web browser ready installed, so the internet is available immediately. The plan is, with the help of an IT friend, to learn how to set up a home web server. I know that I need to install Apache, MySQL and PHP (i.e. the rest of L.A.M.P. – L being Linux) but know little else. I will blog my progress here, and hopefully this will eventually provide a simple step by step guide to how to set up a Linux web server at home. If all goes according to plan, I will be able to save on the month hosting fees that I currently pay. What with the arrival of my baby son, I need to save wherever I can, so hopefully the old pc with help me save [...]