A friend of mine put me onto this link tonight – a nice web admin panel for the Raspberry Pi… and no I didn’t get around to soldering the ESP-12 module – that’s a writeup for the weekend – and yes, my ESP201 module definitely does NOT have the internal aerial hooked up by default – what WERE they thinking about.
Anyway – check out this link! It even updates itself once installed!!!
http://c-mobberley.com/wordpress/2014/09/26/webmin-setup-on-raspberry-pi/
While you are on – Nathan Chantrell is using ESP-01 and MQTT in a setup not a million miles away from where I’m heading… see what you think of this – he has code available.. http://nathan.chantrell.net/20141230/wifi-mqtt-display-with-the-esp8266/#comment-334251