Hi everyone, I’m very proud to announce that my blog “Tigerplug” has today moved to www.tigerplug.com .All posts have been copied there also along with a new design! My blog is now available in 5 different languages!Come on over and check it out!
There seems to be alot of interest out there from Mac users on various forums and websites in setting up your own webhosting from your Mac. So, I have decided to start with this - the first in a series of articles to guide you through setting up your Mac as a web server. I’ll try my best to cover as much as I can in the simplest way possible, so get your nerd hats on and pay attention fellow Mac fans!
The first thing that springs to mind is why on earth would you want to host your own website when you can pay someone else to do it for you?
Well I have a few answers to this.
I’m going to run over a few terms that I will be using in this article:
Web Server - I’m sure when you think of a web server alot of you think of some large mainframe like computer that fills up a temperature controlled room. Well, your wrong. Infact with the right knowledge and software your Mac can do just the same job in most situations.
DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. This is how your computer gets its IP address (for most of you anyway). Your computer puts a request out there and a server replies allocating an IP address to you. This works differently if you have a static IP address but we won’t get into that right now, I will however go into it in greater detail in a post over the coming days.
Localhost - Refers to the local machine. The IP address for the local machine is 127.0.0.1. So, if you are serving a website from your computer and you are sitting in front of it you can fire up a web browser window and type 127.0.0.1 and you will see exactly what is hosted.
Today I am going to start with explaining Apache web server, how to get it working in OS X, how it works and why you should use it.
Apache web server is an open source web server software. You can find the website here: http://www.apache.org/
The Apache people are working on all sorts of great stuff but we are focusing on Apache HTTP Server.
Essentially Apache is the software that serves your website to the www. It is important to understand that Apache accepts HTTP requests through a port on your computer. The default port for the majority of web servers is ‘80′. So when Apache receives a request on port 80 it knows to serve the content. Understood? - No? Ok, well you can read more about how a Apache works here.
Once you’ve got that down, we’re not going to overload your brain. What we are simply going to do today is enable Apache web server on your Mac. Yes, thats right your Mac has Apache already. Not too many people know this, but you just have to know how to enable it.
Lets get into it!
Fire up System Preferences:
Once we have System preferences open we are going to click on “Sharing” - thats the folder with the yellow icon on it (I’m sure you know).
Now we are presented with the sharing preferences window. From here we can enable all sorts of sharing. But again, we are focusing personal web sharing. So we are just going to make sure that the personal web-sharing option it checked like so:
(Yes, I know my IP address is shown but its worthless to you so don’t even try!)
Once thats checked we can close preferences. Now you can fire up your web browser and type the address for your local host which again is 127.0.0.1
If everything is right you should see this (you can click the image to see it full size):
Congratulations, you have now successfully enabled Apache web server on your Mac.
Over the next few posts on this topic (which you will see over the next few days) I plan to:
In the future I also plan to get into more advanced stuff:
So be sure to drop back soon and if you have any questions at all just feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to help you out!
I’ve decided to put together a few tips for bloggers as a guide to what I find most useful as far as successful blogging goes. So here it is!
1. Don’t go off topic - It’s important that you choose a topic and stick to it. If you can’t do this then you are going to find it very hard to build up a following of regular readers. So, choose a topic and stick to it as much as possible.
2. Post often - It’s a good idea post often (within reason). Its generally not a good idea to post every waking minute of the day. But, you should blog on a regular basis if you want to be successful. This is one of the key factors that will influence people in coming back yo your blog. If you post once every six months I doubt very much that you will have many users coming back.
3. Design - Keep a good clean design to your blog. Not to complex, sometimes less is more. Its important to be accessible and to not blind your visitors with too many adds and flash widgets.
4. Quality not quantity - You don’t need me to tell you this! People are not going to read or have any interest in boring or poor quality material. Don’t post just for the sake of posting. You should find something interesting that is relevant to the topic of your blog which you find interesting.
5.Brainstorm - Its a good idea to throw some rough drafts together first rather than just throwing the first idea that comes into your head onto your blog. I find that sometimes its a good idea to write down the topic and then see how I can expand on it, giving the more important and relevant information priority.
6. Be original - No one likes a copycat. Don’t copy material from other sites in the hope of getting hits. This a mistake that many bloggers make when starting out. Remember its good to be different. Just because everyone else is writing about it doesn’t mean you have to.
7. Use keywords - While writing posts consider the best way to word what you are trying to say. Think of search engine results, will people click the link if they see your extract?
8. Tag - I can’t stress this enough, make sure you tag your posts with a relevant category. You wouldn’t believe the amount of new readers that you can reach by doing so. It also helps with search engines.
9. Spell check - Knowing my luck there will be a typo in this post that I won’t notice. Anyway, make sure you spell check and proof read your posts before you publish them! You don’t want to come across as if you haven’t a clue what you’re doing.
10. RSS - Your RSS feed can really increase your readership. Its a good idea to include a link to your feed.
Barry Dorans first gave this a mention at the IMTC (Irish Microsoft Technology Conference). Its pretty good at finding vulnerabilities.
It really shows how Google has evolved and how good their search is.
Check it out here: http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php
Create a blog using Dreameaver, PHP & MySQL
A great tutorial by Marius Zaharia guiding you step by step through building your own blogging system with Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver Club - Video Tutorials
Impressive video tutorials for beginners detailing the use of Dreamweaver with WAMP for testing. Teaches fundamentals of PHP.
Working With CSS And External Style Sheets In Dreamweaver
One of my favourites! Video tutorial from photoshopsupport.com a very reliable source for tutorials, learning Photoshop & Dreamweaver.
Browsing through cyberspace in the early hours of the morning I came across this little genius website http://ajaxload.info/ which will allow you to create your own Ajax loader icons. Very useful if you need a quick icon for Flash or something similar!
Mambo is a great CMS (Content Management System) that you can use to create and manage websites.I’ve been playing around with it alot recently and it looks very promising for me so far. Its very easy to use and the interface is point and click.
The setup for Mambo is very straight forward and I have set it up locally on my iMac running Tiger in about five minutes with no problems whatsoever.
There are two things that you will need before you start the setup.
MAMP - Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP all integrated in one bundle for easy setup. This can be used to test sites on your local machine. You can download it over at www.mamp.info
After downloading and installing MAMP, obviously you need to download Mambo. You can find Mambo over at www.mamboserver.com
Once you have MAMP and Mambo downloaded there is a great tutorial on getting it all setup and running here.
Mamp is very straight forward to use. As you can see here you have simple controls for the servers.
Mamp also includes a simple browser based interface for managing all of the services that it provides:
The interface for Mambo is similar and it’s unbelievably easy to use as you can see below.
The possibilities for this baby are endless. I recommend downloading it and trying it out. Of course Mambo is not the only thing that you can run on MAMP. You can also run other applications such as WordPress.
Heres an application for OSX that I think is definately worth a mention.
Quicksilver is an application laucher which will let you launch applications by using hot keys and typing abbreviations for the application that you want to launch. You really do have to see it to believe it!
For example, if I want to launch Skype I just hit F1 (which happens to be my designated hot key that I have pre-configured in Quicksilver) and then I just start typing the the name of the application. As I am typing Quicksilver searches for the application. Quicksilvers results are rapid, it is unbelievably fast!
I am now that used to Quicksilver that when I log on to my Mac when I get home I just hit F1 and type “sk” and hit return, Skpe then starts. It becomes second nature after a short time of using Quicksilver.
For anyone with a Mac this application is a must and I would definately recommend that you download it. You can find it at http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
The question everyone seems to be asking over the past year or so with the increasing popularity of Apple.
If you have been thinking of switching for a while now but have been just scared of taking the leap, I’m here to tell you why you should switch and also why you shouldn’t. This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to the operating system, but just a few of my favorite things about it. I will be writing more on Mac OS X in the coming posts.
If you haven’t already seen Mac OS X or if you are not familiar with it there are a few things that you should know about the operating system.
Firstly, the core of Mac OS X is named Darwin. Darwin is free, open source and very Unix like. With Mac you can have great hardware with a reliable, tried and tested software configuration. Many businesses rely on Unix every day to keep their websites and applications up and running including the internet giant Google.
Mac OS X also includes a command line interface which harnesses all the power of the usual Unix tools and facilities. All in all Mac OS X is a very stable operating system. Its never let me down once! The ability to run multiple applications simultaneously is unbelievable and when I first switched to Mac it took me a while to truly realize and appreciate how powerful the system is.
The interface is truly beautiful and in my opinion no other GUI can compare in terms of looks and intuition. But remember OS X is not just a pretty face! This baby has served me well so far (this is my third Mac), and handles everyday tasks with ease. I regularly use it for Internet, Office Applications, Music Production and Video Editing. There is great bundled software with the Mac call iLife which covers the majority of multimedia tasks that the average user would carry out on a daily basis.
For the more creative users, Mac OS X can handle applications like Photoshop with ease. I do a reasonable amount of work with Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash and have never struggled with ability as regards computing power!
The search capabilities integrated in OS X are amazing. At any point I can hit a combination of assigned hot keys and fire up a search for anything from audio files to Applications and get results within a second.
OS X also comes with a great email client simply called “Mail”. I find it great and Windows alternatives are just not comparable to it.
The included calendar gets all my organization done in a fast and simple way and allows you to have multiple calendars and set reminders.
Of course there is also an integrated address book to hold contact information which is very easy to use.
The beauty of iCal and the Mac address book is that it will allow you to automatically sync with various devices if you choose to have your system do so via bluetooth. All my contact and Calendar entries sync automatically to my Sony Ericsson K610i when it is within range using an application called “iSync” as you can see below.
I can also use iSync to sync various information including contacts, bookmarks, calendar entries and even files to my dot Mac account on the web, but I won’t get into that now. However, I will be giving dot Mac a mention in the very near future.
iWeb is a an application that comes bundled with OS X & iLife. It’s a simple WYSIWYG website editor that will help you have an impressive website up and running within a matter of minutes. You can even include a podcasts and various multimedia content such as audio and video in your sites.
The default web browser in OS X is Safari which is my personal favorite but of course there are many other popular browsers available for the platform including Mozilla’s Firefox.
For instant messaging I use an application called Adium X which is just perfect and it even integrates all my instant messaging accounts: Yahoo!, AIM, MSN etc. Its the one stop shop for instant messaging on Mac.
As far as office applications go without doubt Microsoft’s Office has the monopoly on the market and luckily there is a version available for Mac OS X which works great. I have never had any cross platform compatibility issues with it. There of course free alternatives that are just as, if not more effective as MS Office like Neo Office for example.
For all you people with iPods it will be no suprise that iTunes comes with Mac and it works great. iTunes is very effective in managing music and iPod’s.
There are no shortage of codecs, bittorrent or P2P applications for Mac and I will be writing about them in future posts.
The bottom line for me is my Mac can do everything that my PC can do, except better!
I have to be honest, as most of you know already I am no fan of Microsoft. I also have absolutely no interest in the Zune. However, this evening I have opened up my trustworthy Mac mail account to find this:
Dear Sir,
Glad to tell you we have one new model for the moment.With
capacity 1GB/ 2GB/ 4GB
2.4 inch TFT 262K color screen
whole metal housing
built-in speaker on the back
built-in FM radio
built-in game
support Mini SD Card
support AVI format video
support MP3,WMA,WAV format audio
suppot JPG,GIF,BMP format image
support TXT format E-book
support 16 languages
super thin shape 83×48×10 mm
weight: 48 gAttached pls find the picture to your reference.
The minimal quantity order is 100 pieces, and the sample order is avaliable
here, but you need to bear the sample fees–1 USD/PC.We ensure you the orginal Samsung IC and the best Philip Chipset. The
warranty is 1 year.Should you have any interests with our goods, pls feel free to contact us.
If possible, pls tell us the capacity and quantity, so that we can give you
the best price.
Any questions, pls tell us,tks!
We are waiting for your kind reply.
Best regards.
Jenny
Now, maybe I’m missing something here…. but I get the impression that they were somewhat “inspired” by Microsoft?The only thing that gets me is why?
I mean, why would you rip off a completely useless product?
I can understand why they would rip off the iPhone and the others on the long list of gadgets. I’ll leave you guys with some more pictures of this sleek, sexy audio gadget… rarhhh! 
Don’t get greedy now I’m sure there’s one for everyone!
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