HOA Site

My Home Owner's Association has a web site that's pretty sparse. I thought that I would take a bit of time to create a new site for them using Drupal, and increase my Drupal skills. There's nothing like throwing yourself into the fire to get out of the comfort of the frying pan, you know? So I was thinking about some features that I might like as a home member of the association, and how I might accomplish them with Drupal.

The first thing I'm going to want to do is get a theme that pleases by aesthetic sensibilities. It's not that the Drupal themes are ugly per se, but they all seem to offer the content in the same way - with the admin stuff exposed for anyone to see. I think that I want the full administrative side of the site to look different than the typical member-facing side. Rather than providing all of the functionality of Drupal the way Drupal does, I would like to select specifically what features appear on the site, and display them in an appealing fashion.

There are some features that I would like to offer. I think that a message board is important for our community. If people could post events to the board and others were subscribed to it, we could all be aware of things in the community that were of interest to us. Having a kind of "classified" section would be nice, too. People could sell items to other people in the community, and offer services, like babysitting. (Oh, that would be fantastic.) It would be extra interesting if you could subscribe to only those channels of interest that you wanted, so then I could eliminate from my feeds things like Historic Yellow Springs events, in which I have no interest....

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Windows Home Server Thoughts

I've been part of the top-secret beta program over the past month or so of Microsoft's new Home Server product, and since it's now been released CTP, I can finally talk about it.

The software is actually really cool in concept. You basically allocate a box as your "home server". Many of us are getting so many computers around the house that it's becoming impractical not to have a dedicated server machine for sharing files and running printers, so it's a good idea to offer software that helps automate some of those tasks.

The Microsoft Home Server software looks like a kind of stripped-down version of Windows 2003 Web Server, but with a few dedicated applications for interacting with your home network. You access the main control portions of the Home Server via a "Terminal Services"-like client. It only allows you to connect to your Home Server, and does not provide you access to the Home Server OS, but a dedicated Home Server control application. When sitting at the Home Server system itself, you have access to a very pared-down version of Windows Server....

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