tl;dr: Some people on LW have a hard time finding worthwhile employment. Share advice and help them out!
Working sucks. I'd rather not work. But alas, a lot of the time, we have to choose between working and starvation. At the very least I'd like to minimize work. I'd like to work somewhere cheap and comfortable... you know, like on the beach in Thailand, like LW (ab)user Louie did. Then I could spend my spare time on things like self-improvement and ahem 'studying nootropics' all day. I'd like to travel, if possible, and not be chained to an iffy job. It'd be cool to have flexible hours. I've read The 4-Hour Work Week but it seemed kinda difficult and scary and... I just don't wanna do it. I can't code, and I'd rather not learn how to. At least, I'd rather not have my job depend on it. I never graduated from college. Hell, I never got my high school diploma, even. A team of medical experts has confirmed that my sleep cycle is of the Chaotic Evil variety. (For those who read HP:MoR, imagine Harry Potter Syndrome, except on crack. I bet a lot of people have similar sleep cycles.) I'm 18, and therefore automatically low status for employment purposes: I'm obviously much too young to make a good teacher, or store manager, or police officer. I can imagine having health problems, or severe social anxiety, or a nearly useless liberal arts degree, or just a general setback limiting my employment opportunities. And if it turned out that I wanted to work 14 hour days all of a sudden because I really needed the money, well then it'd be cool to have that option as well. Alas, none of this is possible, so I might as well just give up and keep on being stressed and feeling useless... or should I?
I bet a whole bunch of Less Wrongers aren't aware of chances for alternative employment. I myself hear myths of people who work via the internet, or blog for a living, or code an hour a day and still make enough to survive comfortably. Sites like elance and vworker (which looks kinda intimidating) exist, and I bet we could find others. Are there such people on Less Wrong that could tell us their secret? Do others know about how to snag one of these gigs? What sorts of skills are easiest to specialize in that could get returns in virtual work? Are virtual markets hard to break into? Can I just blog for an hour or two a day and afford to live a life of simplistic luxury in Thailand? Pretty much everyone on Less Wrong has exceptional writing ability: are there relatively well-paying writing gigs we could get? Alternatively, are there other non-internet jobs that people can break into that don't require tons of experience or great connections or that dreaded and inscrutable bane of nerds everywhere, 'people skills'? Share your knowledge or do some research and help Less Wrong become more happy, more productive, and more awesome!
Oh, and this is really important: we don't have to reinvent the wheel. As wedrifid demonstrated in the earlier Intelligence Amplification Open Thread, a link to an already existent forum is worth ten thousand words or more.
I am not a web developer, but as a Linux user of 15 years let me explain why it might not be as bad as you think.
Get any old computer and put Linux, Apache, MySQL on it. (Those softwares require very little in the way of hardware resources unless you are serving 100s or simultaneous users.) Network the Linux machine with your Windows machine. Even better if your Windows machine has enough memory, run Linux on a virtual machine on Windows. I do not know what the cool kids are using these days in the way of virtualization software, but VMWare would work.
Use a web browser on Windows to test your web app of course.
Editing of text files (mostly config file for Apache, etc) on the Linux box or Linux virtual machine can probably be done using whatever text editor you already use on Windows though I do not know the details of how to set that up in any editor other than Emacs. (For Emacs I would probably use the FTP protocol. The SMB and NFS protocols are alternatives.)
True, you will probably need to interact with a shell on the Linux box or the Linux virtual machine occasionally (using something like PuTTY on Windows), but this way saves you the trouble of having to learn anything about Linux's graphical user interfaces. The good thing about the shell is that it lends itself very well to textual tutorials, with the result that there are 10s of 1000s of blog posts and web pages describing in exact detail how to do stuff in the shell. I would be happy to answer questions by email about the shell, but I do not know about Apache or MySQL.
This way of working with Linux -- by establishing connections to it with browsers, text editors, FTP clients and ssh clients like PuTTY on Windows is very common.
Everything I have described is the worst-case scenario. You can probably either install Apache, MySQL, etc on Windows like wedrifid says or avail yourself of some online service that will host the software for you and allow you to configure and administer it using a web interface.