Notes from a small field

Now that I have my home server pretty much sorted, I’ve had a chance to start experimenting with a few ideas for what to actually do with it.

It’s already publishing CurrentCost data, along with several others, but it’d be nice to do a bit more. One thing that is definitely on my to do list is to hook it up to Twitter. Andy’s house uses Twitter to communicate, which is getting some interest. It’s easy to twitter something from a home server, although not quite so easy to make it interesting, or at least not way too talkative and repetitive. Plus Twitter is a fantastic way to get text message alerts from your house (and a million and one other uses).

The other thing I’d quite like is a nice web based dashboard to replicate some of the information on the CurrentCost screen, but it’s only a tiny home server and, while it does run XAMPP, there’s not much memory left afterwards. It would also be kind of nice to avoid any security holes by not running my own web server. I’ve done a few experiments and it looks like WordPress is the perfect answer: I’ve added a House page which I can update with Google graphs using mtsend.py. The alternative would be to use new posts each time, which would be great to keep a history but that would probably fill up my weblog with even less interesting stuff than is already here!

Quite pleased with the results so far. Now I just need to actually automate some of it!