Advanced Web Publishing

Although your .Mac account isn't a full-service professional-level Web hosting account, it is capable of doing more than publishing photo albums and file-download pages. In fact, as long as your Web pages don't rely on fancy services such as CGIs, PHP scripts, or databases, then the sky is the limit (or, at least your proficiency with an HTML authoring application is the limit).

Custom .Mac Web pages can be set up to look and feel just about any way you like, and you can host movies and pictures, publish blogsanything you can do with HTML and static files that you upload to your iDisk.

So, if Apple's templates just aren't doing it for you, it's OK to code your own. A great crash course in HTML Web design is Elizabeth Castro's Creating a Web Page with HTML: Visual QuickProject Guide (Peachpit Press, 2004). She also wrote the best-selling HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, 6th Edition (Peachpit Press, 2006).

In this section of this book, you'll learn how to integrate a custom-coded Web page into your .Mac account's main page.