Since I got my self-hosted Ubuntu lamp server up and running some while back, I have made it my personal mission to find out exactly what she can do. "Why in the world would you want to run a home server?" is the question I sought to answer for myself, and sought to do so in such a way that any novice could benefit from what nifty things I did find. In this, I tinker with new (new to me) technologies, and see if any inherent level of novelty outweighs any technical level of brain hurt.

The first thing I installed was Drupal, which you can do with apt or synaptic, and it has become the bedrock and center of everything I do on this server. I love to find new ways to interact with my site, new ways to get the site to perform and interact with users, and generally any neat trick I can come up with that has functionality. Every time I discover a new technology, I see if there is a way to integrate it into my Drupal setup, integration is a wonderful thing.

• I can publish to Drupal from my Ubuntu desktop using drivel.
• I can further integrate my Ubuntu desktop with Drupal using Evolution and the excellent calendar module.
• My Tweets and/or Dents go to my Drupal installation via a custom block I got from Twitter
• And my Drupal installation can talk to my identi.ca account when I post new content via a small rewrite of the twitter module for drupal.
• I aggregate interesting news feeds I discover from my Tiny Tiny RSS installation with the core module "aggregator".
• I integrate my Gallery2 online picture gallery with drupal using a great module for the job, and I can publish pictures into that Gallery from my Ubuntu desktop using the excellent F-Spot photo manager
• I can take a picture, plug in my camera to my Ubuntu desktop, and that picture goes right into my Drupal, via Gallery, via F-spot...one click!

Get the picture? I am a geek for integrations between Drupal and my Ubuntu desktop, and between separate services I run on my Ubuntu server and Drupal. I am, in my way, attempting to make a nice transparent portal from my Ubuntu desktop to the internet via Drupal, and vise-versa.

So, in this ongoing effort to self-host and experiment with different technologies I recently decided to install and run with the Openfire Jabber/XMPP server, and see if I could get Drupal and Jabber to play nice together, showing up on my Ubuntu desktop via Pidgin.