I'm impressed that the ISP/host you chose supports Free BSD OS fully. Quite a few ISPs won't give support for non-Windows (or, sometimes, non-Mac) software. I wish they provided more support for Linux ... though, with the "blossoming" of the Linux market into dozens if not hundreds of varieties (flavors), that may soon become an impossible task.
There is probably some other kind of thing that I actually want - a Customer Management System or something.
At a guess, that sounds like a "customer relationship management" (CRM) system, particularly one that has customer service and support features. I found this list of CRM systems (in Wikipedia :-), but that list seems to only include one or two with a customer-service orientation, and only a few of them will run under the Free BSD OS (as "cross-platform"). From what (little) I know of them, there should be at least one or two that support this kind of configuring, though you may want to encourage the customer to fill out the form rather than attaching a file. [Natural-language parsing, even for limited subject "domains" as house-sitting and pet-sitting, is still *hard* for a computer to do; the form also may implicitly detect or prevent omission (or, perhaps, over-specification) of the information. In a different subject domain, I am reminded of the house seller who specified a house siding of "CBS", to the total bewilderment of would-be buyers. It turned out he meant "concrete-brick-stucco," but I'd bet most people were baffled what a building siding and a TV network had in common.]
Given that I need to keep looking for work, I probably won't be able to help much beyond this, but I'm perfectly happy to send you some more details for free if need be. [I have been out of the computing biz for years, and miss it badly.]
It's after 2:30 PDT [5:30am local], so I should be fading out here ... :-/
no subject
There is probably some other kind of thing that I actually want - a Customer Management System or something.
At a guess, that sounds like a "customer relationship management" (CRM) system, particularly one that has customer service and support features. I found this list of CRM systems (in Wikipedia :-), but that list seems to only include one or two with a customer-service orientation, and only a few of them will run under the Free BSD OS (as "cross-platform"). From what (little) I know of them, there should be at least one or two that support this kind of configuring, though you may want to encourage the customer to fill out the form rather than attaching a file. [Natural-language parsing, even for limited subject "domains" as house-sitting and pet-sitting, is still *hard* for a computer to do; the form also may implicitly detect or prevent omission (or, perhaps, over-specification) of the information. In a different subject domain, I am reminded of the house seller who specified a house siding of "CBS", to the total bewilderment of would-be buyers. It turned out he meant "concrete-brick-stucco," but I'd bet most people were baffled what a building siding and a TV network had in common.]
Given that I need to keep looking for work, I probably won't be able to help much beyond this, but I'm perfectly happy to send you some more details for free if need be. [I have been out of the computing biz for years, and miss it badly.]
It's after 2:30 PDT [5:30am local], so I should be fading out here ... :-/