George Butler Web Design

Basic Web Server

MAMP is great. It’s an easy way to host your PHP/MySQL site locally for testing and development. But, if you want to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s built in web server capabilities, OS X makes it easy. Go into System Preferences > Sharing, and check the “Web Sharing” box.

That’s it. You can now setup an HTML-only website locally. Where do you put the files? The default folder is /Library/WebServer/Documents/. While we’re at it, let’s setup PHP and MySQL to work locally, as well.

Test it. http://localhost. No need for a port as it will use apache’s default port 80.

PHP and MySQL will now need to be setup for a full functioning local host. Read More »

It’s a constant struggle to be noticed in this ever expanding internet landscape. The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) provides the brightest beacon for our robot friends. In that effort, headings are crucial elements. No matter what advances may come, information hierarchy will remain. Read More »

Two years of blood, sweat, and bezier curves. That’s what it takes to make your average font family. Two years of painstaking work in an under-appreciated and underpaid industry. Too many years to watch your pockets picked by an internet culture of open source, free distribution. It’s no surprise that @font-face scares the bejesus out of type designers. As a result, progress has been slow and attitudes more cautious about embedded type. Read More »

Fonts were not designed to mix and match. Sure, we can consult the Font Matrix and find an available font. But, tailored web safe typography has always been seen as a luxury. With the proliferation of desktop publishing software, computers are now preloaded with more system fonts than ever before. With greater choice comes greater control. Read More »