Now you can use Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing to publish web pages or share files on the Internet or on your companys (or schools) local area network from a folder on your hard disk.
You can display your documents on the Internet or restrict access to a chosen few within a local area network. Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing makes it a snap.
Heres how it works: Once youve turned on Web sharing (see sidebar) and youre online, all you need to do is copy a file in HTML format to the Web Pages folder (in the Sites folder in your Home directory, on your computers hard disk), and thats it. Youre done your page is ready for viewing. Make sure you have someone handy to exchange high fives with.
Its so easy that even a first-timer can do it (by the way, if that describes you, see HTML, Anyone? on this page to learn how you can use your word processing application to generate HTML documents quickly and easily with just a few clicks of a mouse).
Something else youll notice about Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing: as server software goes, its about as stable as a block of granite. Thats because its built on the Apache web server, one of the many industrial-strength, industry-standard technologies that are part of the modern Darwin core foundation underlying Mac OS X.
Apache Web Server
The Apache server started out as a project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Since then Apache has been continuously developed and strengthened by members of the open source community (who also helped develop certain core areas of Mac OS X). The Apache server has earned such a reputation for rock-solid reliability that it currently hosts over half the websites on the Internet and almost all of the coolest and most heavily-visited ones. Including Apples own website and now yours, too.
HTML, Anyone?
Yes, anyone. Because the good news is that you dont have to learn HTML to use it: leading word processing applications actually generate HTML documents for you.
For the benefit of new users: HTML short for hypertext markup language is what webmasters and designers use to publish text and graphics on the Internet in a form that can be read by anyone using a Mac or PC.
Both Pages and TextEdit let you create HTML files, for your own virtual printing press.