plunk

Apr 27 2009

Do-It-Yourself .Mac

Feeling left out of the .Mac club? $99 more than you care to plunk down on
Internet services? In true Freeloader fashion, I have a bargain alternative.

Actually, two. We will cover some free software and services that will put
you on near equal footing with dot-mac-ers, but first we’ll need to make a
small investment on web space.

This is one thing I won’t go free on – because every free host I have tried
either bombards you with ads or is nowhere near reliable. For web presence,
I have two plans:

Brown Bag

Sure the kids make fun of you, until they see what kind of bike you ride
home. My extreme bargain plan gives you dependable, 25 megabyte site with
MS11. The hosting is free after a one-time set-up fee of $11. There are no more charges or ads, plus you get unlimited bandwidth and FTP access. Online support
is free and reliability is very good.

School Lunch

For those of you that are willing to pay a little more for style, get your
own domain and free hosting from DotEasy. You’ll get 20 megabytes of web
space and 10 email accounts at your domain, all for $29.95 (yearly with no monthly fees) which includes
domain registration.

The Free Stuff

Now, we won’t be able to match .Mac feature-for-feature, but we’ll come
close.

First, you’ll need to set up iCal to publish your calendar to your FTP site.
Both of the above provide full FTP access. With your calendar online, others
will be able to subscribe to it on your web server. If you want to publish
your iCal in HTML, you can join iCal World and host it there for free or
convert it on your Mac with iCal2html.

Next, lets get your bookmarks and contacts on your site. Since IfThen
discontinued My Favorites Martian, I have yet to find a good bookmark or
address syncing application. Netscape does allow you to sync contacts
between computers in their address book, if you like. Instead we’ll use
HTMLize Address Book and Safari2HTML to turn our Address Book and Safari bookmarks into
HTML.

If you chose School Lunch, you have your email taken care of. If you opted
for Brown Bag, you’ll need to find a free email provider. With httpmail plugin you
can send and receive from a free Hotmail account from Mail.app.

.Mac also offers online photo albums. Because images eat p space, we’ll
store ours with Webshots for free and link to our albums from our site.

Finally, the iDisk. This is one category where I can’t compete. I didn’t
find any online back-up services worth anything. If you want to back-up
files online, then you’ll have to spring for the real thing.

With all this traffic going to your FTP, you’ll want quick access to it. Use
AutomountMaker to mount your FTP space like an extra drive when you log in. FTP
support in the Finder is a little funky at times, be you can’t beat the
convenience.

So, thanks to bargain hosting and some free services and utilities we have a
nice pair of poor-man solutions comparable to .Mac. Not perfect, but for
just over a tenth or under a third the price, it’s not bad.

Brian

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