OK. I have a multi-media server running gentoo Linux. it has an apache web server that I use to serve media to my iPod touch. I would like to add a page that allows me to control mplayer ( running on the server displaying to my tv ) from the safari web browser on my iPod so that I could use it as a remote. I have mplayer configured as a slave and it gets it's input from a fifo file. so if I were to:
it will pause the movie playing on my tv. What I would like to do is some how echo various commands into this fifo file when I 'click' one of the images on a web page hosted from the same computer that is running mplayer.

I was hoping some of you with more experience coding web pages could give me some examples of how to do this.

What web programming language are you able to work in?

This probably could be done with a cgi script if the user your server is running as has access to the /var/tmp/mplayer_remote file.

Well I had never worked with any kind of cgi script before, but I found out how to use bash scripting for cgi. It's still a little primitive but now I have a basic webpage with the icons I made in gimp arranged in a table. when I click one of these 'buttons' it calls a bash script in my cgi-bin directory and passes it the arguments to echo into the fifo file. the bash script also automagicly redirects you to the Remote.html. it's not as fast as I like you have to wait about half a sec between button presses but it works and I can now control mplayer with my ipod touch. It took a bit of experimenting to find out that apache runs my cgi scripts in a chrooted environment (probably a good thing) so I had to relocate my fifo file to: /var/www/localhost/cgi-bin/tmp/mplayer_remote

thanks for your suggestion to look into cgi scripts.