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