Setting up a server requires a lot of knowledge and following maintenance.
I suggest creating an already installed, configured and automatically updated server-in-a-box.
It can be expensive and be powerful or cheap to handle family issues or the local sports team.
Everyone wants a server running at home, don’t we?
But not everyone has the geek powers to rebuild an old machine, configure it, secure it, poke proper holes in the fire wall and finally maintain it.
Not every server has to be run 24/7 and not every server has to withstand big loads or even be public to everyone.
So start small. A mobile phone on 3G is outside your fire wall. It might not be on your LAN even. It is low powered but has quite hefty innards to crunch numbers and is inherently good at networking.
Use some kind of dynamic DNS and start the app manually or automatic when connected to the charger.
The pragmatic choice for selecting language to learn programming in is javascript. It is not a Good language to learn programming in but it is easy to get stuff graphical, interactive and published. (Perhaps actionscript is better.)
After very little hacking in javascript a backend is needed for persisting data between sessions. Also other functionality is needed like user handling. So why not create a very simple server side app that does this? It can’t be used for serious applications but for simple html/javascript for youngsters wanting to learn it should do alright.
(copied from the old site)
There is a safe way to write client side script; Javascript in the web browswer.
But there is no way to do it on the server.
There are free hosting sites but no one I am aware of allows upload of server side scripts.
Wouldn’t it be nice to allow for The Kids to do simple interactive sites?
Allow for a (script) language, a database and let the server handle resources and CPU so noone can’t clog the machine.
Update: Google has something like it with Google apps scripthttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/scripts/overview.html