So I wanted to set up my demo to be available at a friendly local URL when I run it tomorrow, so I decided to check out how avahi is doing these days.

sudo aptitude install avahi-server

Then edit /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf

host-name=<yourhostname>

Restart avahi and your server will show up as <yourhostname>.local (or something similar, if there is a conflict) for Mac and Linux desktops. We did this kind of functionality with PyZeroConf in an old project I worked on that needed a lot more mDNS and other multicast support, but for something this simple, the built-in library is really convenient.