As some of you may know, I’m a huge believer in OSS and doing awesome stuff for free. Of course, I have to make a living, but outside of 9-5, I do a bunch of free stuff. And when I started playing Minecraft, a friend of mine invited me to his server. He had a pretty bland website with no domain (you’d get to it by IP). To express my gratitude at his hosting of a great Minecraft server, I offered to clean it up. He gave me root access to his machines as I bought a domain, and I hopped on the web server (a linux machine) and set up LAMP (Linux/Apache2/MySQL/PHP). I threw Wordpress on it and got down to business customizing styles and writing custom PHP to drive some of the extra functionality. We wanted a little more, so I also threw SMF on there. The end result is a pretty nice website: Miners’ Guild. I’m definitely satisfied with the end result.
In addition to this, I wrote a bunch of custom server mods. We didn’t really want to use Bukkit (though it is great), so I instead wrote several custom mods myself that add some of the things we needed, such as better banning, item restrictions, chest protection, and - of course - exploding arrows (this can be toggled). It was great contributing to help make my friend’s server as awesome as possible. Come visit sometime if you play Minecraft!