Apr 27 2009
AMP your Mac’s Webserver Part 2
After Part I we should all have an operationalwebserver. Hopefully its running SSL , which will allow us to encrypt our browser sessions when we log in remotely. Any old box can serve up web pages. Our mission now is to unleash the truly Mac part of our machines over the web.
Getting Your iLife Over the Web
Accessing your Mac via web browser can be fast, safe and easy (not to mention simpler that setting up a VPN). In order to access these services on your Mac, you must configure your home network to be accessible from the web.
Machete and iTunes2web
Machete installs scripts that let you access your iTunes music from any web browser. You can search and play your tunes through a very Mac-like front end. If you’d rather not expose your music files to the web,iTunes 2web will let you browse through your library (without play access) via the web. If you’d like to control your home music remotely, we can do that too with
Browse your iPhoto library (and create a photocast) on your Mac from the web. Thumbmnails and search help you organize your photos in a nice clean interface. And you can photocast without a .Mac account. Did I mention security and AJAX?
Record TV on your Mac with EyeTV? With this simple PHP script you can access your recordings, see names, channels and times and even download the MPEG files through a web interface. eyetv FTW will even let you see what is recording.
Other Useful Tools
Now that we’ve made out Mac accessible from the web, why not set your Mac’s homepage as your desktop? Windoze has Active Desktop that turns your wallpaper into a browser. Now, we can do it on a Mac too.
To complete our remote administration round up, we’ll want to grab Relay, an AJAX file management tool with image preview. You can drag and drop between folders. You can remotely manage your MySQL database with TurboDbAdmin. This snazzy free tool lets you view and edit your databases in a familiar interface. Last but not least, you can run a web based email/calendar system with Zimbra. This Open Source rival to Outlook/Exchange lets you tag and manage your email and collaboration.
Apache, MySQL and PHP open a whole new platform of web-based applications to your Mac. Have fun!