Getting on the cloud

On Friday, I began renting a virtual server from linode.com. It's a linux thing. I'm using Ubuntu. Renting the virtual server is cheap and pretty easy. My colleague, Daniel Lovins, is helping me with advice, encouragement and answers to a few dumb questions. (Thanks, for the hand-holding and the example, Daniel.) Today, with Daniel's help, I installed Apache and MySQL. I'm starting to learn Vi, too. My plan is to set up drupal, an instance of vufind, and the eXtensible Catalog Metadata Toolkit (XC MST), and then I'll see what I can do with these tools in this environment. I have a lot to learn, but I feel that I am now able to actually play with the right toys.