Macintosh starring role: The status screen of WebStar indicates recent connections from the source domain and the file being accessed.

Robust, cheap Mac Web server

So, the boss says you've gotta have a Web site up by the end of the year -- only he won't give you much money, and don't ask for any help.

Maybe what you need is a Macintosh-based World-Wide Web server.

You could buy a whole web server setup from Apple in the form of the Apple Internet Server Solutions. This package includes software bundled with a variety of Mac Workgroup Servers, with prices ranging from $2900 to $8000. But that won't do because the boss won't let you spend much.

Maybe you need to recommission that old Mac the art department folks turned their noses up at when PowerPCs came out. But you'd still need software.

Webstar, from StarNine Technologies Inc. of Berkeley, Calif., is the core of the Internet Server Solutions anyway, so rush right out and buy a copy. The boss won't mind -- the list price is $795, but the on-line ordering price is $499 (http://www.starnine.com/).

We here at the Font of Publishing Knowledge have run Webstar (and its shareware predecessor, Machttp) for more than nine months (see The Cole Papers, May 1995), and have had few troubles with the system.

Our setup is based on an elderly Mac IIcx, which has 20 megabytes of RAM and a 170 megabyte hard drive. It is connected to the Internet via a 28.8 kbps modem (http://colegroup.com/).

The beauty of Webstar is twofold -- ease of setup and extensibility. The downloaded software was a double-click away from being on-the-air. It took us less than five minutes to get the server running.

There are a few minor tweaks you'll want to make to Webstar, which can be handled easily through a separate application called Webstar Admin, and then you can get into the business of building a Web site.

Webstar exemplifies the Macintosh model of ease-of-use, and you have the bonus that you probably are something of a Mac system expert -- or have one kicking around the office somewhere (which is probably not the case with UNIX or Windows NT).

Webstar can be extended to handle virtually any feature you've seen on the Web through common gateway interfaces (CGIs), many of which have been written as freeware or shareware by the burgeoning Webstar community.

Turn to the StarNine resource pages and you'll easily find Ismaps -- which provide the ability to click on any area of a graphic and get a link to another page -- as well as database interfaces for most of the major desktop databases, such as Fourth Dimension, FoxPro, FileMaker Pro and Butler.

Commercial software has been written to extend Webstar as well, with CGIs to allow the presentation of special pages to specific users (defined by browser or site of origin), chat areas, bulletin board forums and user registration.

And if you're something of a hacker yourself, there are examples on how to write Webstar CGIs in C, AppleScript, Frontier or MacPerl.

Webstar users proudly proclaim the stability of their systems and the server software. Recently, one webmaster announced that his Webstar system had made more than one million connections over a 70-day period without a single burp.

There are more than 1000 registered Webstar servers on the Internet; many more run on internal corporate or educational networks. Newspapers using Webstar include the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News, Indianapolis Newspapers and the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. Magazines include Air & Space as well as the new on-line magazine Salon fin de siècle.

So, now all you need to do is develop content -- and what better place to make nifty graphics than on a Macintosh?

Many webmasters say that all you need to develop web content is a word processor and Adobe's Photoshop (some are willing to forgo Photoshop for shareware, but we suspect you've got the premiere image manipulation program around somewhere).

A couple of visits to some of the HTML authoring sites (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/HTML-primer.HTML, for example) or one of the ubiquitous HTML programming books will get you up to speed, but there are also shareware WYSIWYG tools (HTML Web Weaver, Arachnid) as well as the new commercial product, Adobe PageMill (see The Cole Papers, November 1995).

You'll still need a connection to the Internet, which can run into bucks. The 28.8 kbps connection here is $140 a month and you can expect to pay two or three times that for more speed -- not to mention the cost of the connecting hardware and leased lines.

Even so, you've probably gotten yourself onto the World-Wide Web for less than $1500, which likely meets the boss's cost edict.

Those late nights alone, coding HTML pages? Chalk them up to experience.

StarNine Technologies Inc., (510) 649-4949.

-- dmc

See also: The decision after deciding to go on the Web: how to do it

From THE COLE PAPERS, December 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.