I would like to learn HTML and web design. I have Mac OS 10.3. Does anyone have any recommendations as to software/books/websites? Not looking to design anything fancy, just basic text , a few photos, and attached files. Price is a consideration.
I know this has been asked before, but darned if I could find it in a search.
To create HTML, you’ll need a text editor. TextWrangler is free and will do the job, but it doesn’t have any HTML support (for that, Bare Bones Software wants to sell you their (well-regarded) BBEdit and BBEdit Lite programs instead). Still, it’s enough to get started with.
To manipulate images, get GraphicConverter (free) if it didn’t already come with your Mac. It’s shareware with a nag screen, but ignore it if you want. Just launch it once and never quit; your Mac won’t mind.
To test/develop your web stuff, go to System Preferences and click on “Sharing”. Turn on “Personal Web Sharing,” and your Mac will start running the world-famous Apache web server. Stick your HTML files in the “Sites” folder in your Home directory, and you can access them with a web browser of your choice.
Attached files is not something that’s handled by HTML; you’d either need to put the files on a server somewhere (see the previous paragraph) and have links to them on your web pages, or get into a full-blown content-management system, which is way too advance for a beginning web designer.
The first three paragraphs alone will get you a long way. You’ve got PHP under the hood, if you want to play with that, and if you install Apple’s free developer’s tools, I’m pretty sure you have a Java compiler if you want to write applets, too. But those topics are for the advance classes… 
All you need to do html is a text editor and some tutorials. I’ve found that the W3schools tutorials on html and CSS are excellent.
Any reason to use TextWrangler instead of Appleworks? Appleworks saves as bare text doesn’t it?
I didn’t know that file sharing opened me up as a pseudo-ftp website. That’s neat!
Ahh, I had hit File sharing, not Web File sharing. Now it came up as a normal website. So if I have “always on” broadband and leave my computer on all the time… is there any reason I would pay someone to host a website rather than just leaving it on my own machine?
If you have a dynamic IP, and you probably do, the web site address will eventually change (might be hours, days, or months). If you’ve got a static address, or some way to map a dynamic IP to a hostname (google “Dynamic DNS” for more info), you could get away with it.
Also note that most home broadband is designed for download rather than upload, so there may be bandwidth limitations, or outright prohibitions from your ISP.
And of course if your site becomes popular, you’d need to move it to hosting that can handle the load.
Otherwise, yes, you can just leave it on your own machine. Being a Mac, you’re relatively safe from hacking, too. I do this for one of my low-traffic (non-commercial) sites; makes updating easy.
Sure, but (a) Appleworks is a creaking kludge, and I recommend avoiding it wherever possible, and (b) a text-only editor lets you get right into editing your files without mucking around with fonts and formatting and whatnot.
For web developers, a Mac running MacOS X is a one-stop workstation. 
I recommend Taco for simple HTML editing. Or, you can fiddle around with Nvu—once you figure out how to work it, it’s quite a servicable little WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web creation program. Both of these work with OS X and are free. I’ve made little web pages with both of them and they’re a lot of fun.
As far as graphics programs, look around for Photoshop Elements 2 (that’s one version back—we’re now on version 3). It’s about 20 dollars used on Amazon and other places. It’ll work on OS X, and work well.
If you pony up the $30 fee for QuicktimePro you can edit movies more efficiently than in iMovie. The Gimp is also ported to OS X and has a lot of features that GIFConverter doesn’t.
BBEdit is very nice, but a bit pricey. You can do the same thing with a basic, free text editor, though you won’t get nice features like tag highlighting and syntax correction. TextEdit (part of the default installation in OS X) or TextWrangler, made by the same group that makes BBEdit, will do a fine job. According to a friend who does web design part-time, if you want to do powerful stuff like CSS, go with BBEdit and pay the fee; it’ll be worth it in the long run.
That’s oversimpliyfing things a tad. iMovie is designed to edit camcorder footage, and IMO does a terrific job of that. Quicktime Pro(*) is set up to let you edit any kind of Quicktime footage, in any number – but the user interface is a bear and a half. I wouldn’t want to edit an entire home movie with Quicktime Pro, but you can’t do multiple video tracks with iMovie as-is.
(* = Note that the only thing “Pro” about Quicktime Pro is that it unlocks the editing and full-screen capabilities of the Quicktime player. You can just as easily get a free/shareware non-Apple Quicktime player/editor and edit videos without forking over for the “Pro” key)
Last I checked, Textedit won’t save as plaintext, which you need for HTML.
I made the mistake of spending my time downloading The GIMP a few months ago. Once I got it, I realized that I had no idea at all how to even go about beginning to get it into a useable form. No, it’s prepackaged software designed for morons for me.
I’ve used Nvu to reasonable effect. Having been a Professional Web Master™, I have ZERO desire to hand code tables anymore. I preferred FrontPage on the PC side of things (early on, it was the best editor for creating sane HTML pages you could edit in notepad without breaking, and were most compatible with all browsers. Since then everyone else has caught up).
There doesn’t appear to be a WYSIWYG app like Frontpage for cheap, and I don’t much care to learn a Macromedia product.
I use the GREAT Jalbum to package my photos for web consumption. http://jalbum.net/ It’s java, and completely cross-platform.
It’s set up to save as RTF by default, but you can set it up to save as Unicode 8 or 16, or one of several other plain text formats in the preferences. I have mine set up to use plain text for new documents unless otherwise specified.
I have found a problem with TextEdit, though. If you save as UTF8 and you’re using 8 bit characters like Japanese, the encoding gets screwed up for some reason. Neither TextEdit nor another program will get rid of the mojibake. The solution is to use UTF16 if you’re going to use Unicode with those character sets. Hopefully other people besides me have complained about it to Apple and it will be fixed sometime.
I do prefer TextWrangler to TextEdit for most things, and TW is a free dowload.
I’m assuming you meant “No, it’s not prepackaged…”
Okay, no argument there. I’m semi-computer-savvy and didn’t have too much of a problem, but it would be a royal pain in the butt for someone with less of a clue than me. Since that’s the case, stick with GIFConverter or the Photoshop Elements application mentioned above.
The biggest roadblock to installing most Linux-derived applications is that X11 is an option --not a default-- when you’re installing the system and, depending on the disk format, may be located on another disk from the main installation disk. Once you’ve got the X11 system installed, you’re probably not going to have too much of a problem, but like all UNIX-like applications it’s made for and by geeks. It’ll probably never be a drag-drop-open operation like most apps designed for OS X.
Actually, I meant “No, in the future I will not use programs such as this. It will be only prepackaged software programs for me.”
Ohhh, X-11 is an option. I see. Yes. X11. Very good.
I of course have no idea what an X-11 is.
And this, boys and girls, is why Linux and almost all of the open-source programs will be relegated to the back alleys of computerdom. Unless they somehow manage to pull things together and get a decent user interface that doesn’t require knowing what daemons, dependencies, and package managers are, much less what version your kernel is. Regular people want to get the program running and get some damn work done, not screw around trying to get stuff to work. Then there are people like me; geeky enough to try and screw around with it, not geeky enough to solve any real problems if they pop up.
BoringDad, you’re probably not interested, but I thought I’d let you know what X11 is anyway. It’s a window display system. It provides the basic tools for making a Graphical User Interface (GUI) work. Without it, or something like it, you’re stuck with entering text commands to get stuff done. Not so bad, if you know what you’re doing, but if you’re clueless (you) or near-clueless (me) you’d really rather prefer to work with pretty pictures and mouse clicks.
OS X uses something different to handle windows and icons, but it includes X11 so that people who want to use UNIX-variants can use the most common system out there in the *NIX world. If your Mac came with CDs, this option is probably on the third CD, marked “Developer Tools” or something like that. If on a DVD, you can see it as an option in the installer. Or, you could download it as a package from Apple or a third party. It works pretty much like any other installation. Here is a page that will walk you through getting X11 up and running.
Not that you really wanted to know.
While I am unlikely to download this, I do appreciate the explanation.