Now you can use Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing to publish web pages or share files on the Internet — or on your company’s (or school’s) 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.

Here’s how it works: Once you’ve turned on Web sharing (see sidebar) and you’re 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 computer’s hard disk), and that’s it. You’re done — your page is ready for viewing. Make sure you have someone handy to exchange high fives with.

It’s 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 you’ll notice about Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing: as server software goes, it’s about as stable as a block of granite. That’s because it’s 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 Apple’s own website — and now yours, too.

HTML, Anyone?

Yes, anyone. Because the good news is that you don’t 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.