TITLE: What are the possible uses for local webpages in a shared 
flat?
DATE: 2017-12-10
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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We have a computer in our shared flat that runs headless in the 
background all the time. Normally we just use it to run a local 
minecraft server, but recently I've been thinking about whether it 
could be used to host a web-app or something like that. But what 
possible use is there for a web-app or page that just runs locally 
on a headless machine?

There's a few issues to contend with before I start thinking about 
what the content of the app could be. The first one being that 
nobody is going to log in via ssh in order to see the app, it needs 
to be accessible easily at all times on a web browser, with a 
simple address that you can bookmark and won't disappear.

I guess a HTML5 app is the obvious choice, and define a local URL 
for it so other flatmates don't have to remember an IP address, and 
would be able to access it as long as they were on the WiFi.

What would the app contain?

-   An interactive chore calendar
-   A bill splitter
-   A message board - This wouldn't work as there are already too 
many easily accessible chat clients, and I don't want to add 
another one. We use Whatsapp pretty effectively.

We also thought about just using it as a movie server or something 
like that. But again I'm not sure there is much of a use case for 
that, most people don't download things now like I do, they stream 
them instead. So that probably wouldn't take off.

So far I've been using the computer as a backup for some important 
files that I want to keep in cold-storage, but that isn't very 
creative either.

While productivity apps seem quite boring, I think they could be 
useful.