So I'd been hearing a lot about ownCloud. Really sounded like a way to become more independent as a netizen, and since I was already running my own mini server I knew it was only a matter of time before I'd have to install it. But what finally convinced me to do it soon was Klaatu's super-enthusiastic appraisal on Gnu World Order (which reminds me, Klaatu's also the reason I'm trying emacs instead of vim or gedit for this post).
Installing is really simple. I pulled the development version from the Gitorious repo to my web directory. I then had to change the permissions on the ownCloud folder
chown -R www-data:www-data owncloud/
After that I just had to navigate to the site and follow the ownCloud setup, basically involving just setting up a MySQL database and pointing ownCloud to it.
Really simple.
ownCloud is being quite actively developed at the moment, with commits being pushed by several different developers daily and an active IRC channel on freenode. One cool experience I had the day I set it up was finding a bug in the text editor and having a (temporary) fix applied within minutes (literally) by asking in the IRC.
I think one of the most exciting aspects of ownCloud is how easy it seems to extend functionality. In particular, I'm interested in the RSS aggregator that's in the early stages of development. Time to start looking at the code and hopefully get involved with that.