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Bits and bytes

The business of web sites

Following is a professional perspective on the vital elements of a web site.

Netprint

A utility I find very, very useful is Net-Print. It adds an icon to the menu bar, and allows you to print the selected part of a document or web page, or collect a number of pieces together to be saved or printed. You can configure which applications it appears in - I use it just for Netscape. It's so unintrusive I forget it's there until I need it, and then it's quick and easy. And yes, I paid for it.

MacReviewZone

Well I was asked by someone at work to check out accounting software. Frankly, after writing accounting software for four years of my life I found the prospect less than thrilling. But I did find a neat review site! MacReviewZone has the ranking and link to the full text of reviews from a number of good Mac mags including MacAddict and Macworld.

MacTech magazine

I found another good magazine site for those of us that just can't stand idly by and not tinker. MacTech magazine has a lot of good news and info for programmer's and technical folks as well as excellent archives of articles, utilities.

LinuxPPC

I spent some time upgrading and reconfiguring ProFTPd on the LinuxPPC box. I had to do it so our Xerox DC265 had somewhere to ftp the files it scans. What a neat beast, it's a multi-function office copier according to Xerox but it has some excellent features that make it a little more than that.

First off it copies at 65 pages a minute. You can print to it (via AppleTalk or a host of other net protocols), including a feature where you can just send it the PDF file via the built in web server. The built in web server allows you to reconfigure it from the desktop. It scans real well, too. I've set up ours so it then ftps the files onto my LinuxPPC box. Then set up my friend netatalk to share out the ftp folder tree via AppleTalk. The 265s doco mutters about fax facilities so I guess that's the next thing I get to play with.

Macintosh Programmer's Workshop

Another gem I've forgotten to mention so far is MPW or the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. We used to pay a large chunk of real money to Apple for this beast but they've now made it available free. Don't be put off by the name, it's really just a very powerful command line interface to your Mac, along with a bunch of tools useful for programming including an assembler, C and C++ compiler, and a source code control system.

Apple - Find - Area

I found a very good page for navigating the huge system that is the Apple web sites. Apple - Find - Area has a list of all the different web servers Apple has, including pointers to your national one if outside the US.

Combined with Apple - Find - Sitemap you can quickly find the information you want from their system.

URL Manager Pro

I'm amazed that I've gone this far into the log and not mentioned URL Manager Pro. I can only surmise that URL Manager Pro is like breathing, I don't think about it. It certainly is an excellent tool for managing URL's, I even use it for large scale changes to my bookmarks file as it will read your bookmarks file in allow you to check it for duplicates, organise it, sort the entries and then export it back out. It will also export any part of the URL collection to HTML and suck all URLs off a page on your web browser. Another tool I appreciated so much I paid for it.

Ghostscript

Someone just reminded me that the later versions of Ghostscript can convert a PostScript file into a PDF file with no fuss. This comes in very handy for sending people files they can print if you are using a rare application to produce your files.

The link above will give you links to both Linux versions and Mac versions. If your are going to run it on a Linux box then make sure you have the latest version of Enscript which turns ASCII into PostScript with a nice bunch of bells and whistles.

The AusMac Archive

For Australian readers of this log I've found a good mirror site at The AusMac Archive. This site has what seems to be a mirror of the info-mac archive as well as mirrors of some useful web sites that I've already mentioned such as St Clair and Stairways. Much faster than using the trans Pacific cable to get your files and view the sites.

Netatalk

I needed a good way for my Mac users to load new files onto the intranet web server so I got Netatalk working which turns a Linux box into an Appleshare server. It also allows you to print from the Linux box to an AppleTalk printer. It comes standard with PPC Linux so I really just had to get the configuration right. To keep them away from the entire web server I established a share directory and placed links to only the directories they need to access in it. Netatalk also handled the security well as it translates Linux groups to Appleshare groups.

The IconFactory

If you enjoy custom icons for your folders, files and disks then you should visit The IconFactory. They have a large range of freeware icons, links to other icon sites and a bunch of excellent shareware icon utilities to make changing your icons a breeze. They even have Charlie Brown and Looney Tunes icon sets, not to mention some my daughter would enjoy. (Though I have yet to find a Winnie The Pooh icon set for her. Mail me at info@six.com.au if you know of one.)

MacAddict

There must be a dozen Mac magazine sites out there, most offering a newsletter, some articles, some downloads and a search engine. Some are a cut above the rest in the quality of their site and the quality of their newsletter. My favourite has seriously deteriorated over the past two onths and the search was on. So now I've tried MacAddict and I'm impressed. I like their site and the newsletter is not just a compendium of news releases, you can even choose to get it weekly or daily.

I've been getting MacAddict since about issue one. If you subscribe, you get a CD every month with a selection of games, applications, utilities and demos. I depend on it for software updates, including Apple's updates to the system and utilities. Every CD contains an index to all previous CDs, so it's pretty easy to find the software you need. The only gripe and a half I have is that the software on the CD is increasingly PowerPC only, a slight inconvenience to those of us with a fine collection of vintage 68K Macs, and the descriptions on the CD don't always point that out.

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