Floofies
Maker of Logos
What is one of the most important things to you, when setting up an old Pre-OSX Mac? Getting the system running at it's best, getting it on the internet, and upgrading it to hell and back!? Maybe! I can say for sure that most people are probably going to include filesharing in that list, and know that doing so isn't exactly easy 100% of the time. For those of us with AppleShare-native operating systems, it might be a walk in the park, but what about everyone else? We can use a multitude of specific software to facilitate filesharing if we lack the aforementioned... with some caveats. Things can and usually do go wrong in several ways, and eventually you might be left asking: "Why isn't there a more simple solution?". That is why I've made this post... and this open-source software: https://github.com/Floofies/plopbox-core
Upon first glance, you can likely tell it requires HTTP/PHP/SQL, so it's not a "Mac App". Plainly explained, it's a simple/lightweight little package of PHP files that generate a file index, kind of like Apache's built-in autoindex module (which I'm sure everyone has seen). Apache's autoindex module is actually pretty nice for filesharing, and I used it to share files one-way to a Quadra 630 running System 7.6.1. When I first set up my Q630, I tackled the problem of filesharing head-on, eventually going as far as running a Windows Server 2000 VM. Everything I tried was a bit chunky, and usually never a full solution. I turned back to Apache, and saw how simple it was, how easy to set up it was; and it got me thinking! Why not design my own autoindex?
As I cobbled my project together, it started to look more like a modern web-app, and definitely didn't display correctly on a 68k Mac. Turns out my designer instincts took over at some point, and made quite the CSS problem on old browsers. That's when the idea of "simple mode" occurred to me. Instead of designing a potentially ugly filebrowser just for old computers, I wanted to make something flexible, something you could use for modern computers as well. In my software, you can toggle between "Normal Mode (CSS + JS on)" and "Simple Mode (CSS + JS off)", making it quite useful on old browsers. The feature can be toggled via a self-propagating URI argument, so all you need to do is bookmark the site with the argument inside the URI. Simple mode is only the beginning, however, as I plan on adding several other features to make it truly useful on 68k Macs. That's where this thread comes into play.
I need suggestions here, and a little more than that, I also need some truly bright thinkers. My ideas are simply a bit too ambitious: to create a bidirectional file sharing solution that also works on old browsers.
Upon first glance, you can likely tell it requires HTTP/PHP/SQL, so it's not a "Mac App". Plainly explained, it's a simple/lightweight little package of PHP files that generate a file index, kind of like Apache's built-in autoindex module (which I'm sure everyone has seen). Apache's autoindex module is actually pretty nice for filesharing, and I used it to share files one-way to a Quadra 630 running System 7.6.1. When I first set up my Q630, I tackled the problem of filesharing head-on, eventually going as far as running a Windows Server 2000 VM. Everything I tried was a bit chunky, and usually never a full solution. I turned back to Apache, and saw how simple it was, how easy to set up it was; and it got me thinking! Why not design my own autoindex?
As I cobbled my project together, it started to look more like a modern web-app, and definitely didn't display correctly on a 68k Mac. Turns out my designer instincts took over at some point, and made quite the CSS problem on old browsers. That's when the idea of "simple mode" occurred to me. Instead of designing a potentially ugly filebrowser just for old computers, I wanted to make something flexible, something you could use for modern computers as well. In my software, you can toggle between "Normal Mode (CSS + JS on)" and "Simple Mode (CSS + JS off)", making it quite useful on old browsers. The feature can be toggled via a self-propagating URI argument, so all you need to do is bookmark the site with the argument inside the URI. Simple mode is only the beginning, however, as I plan on adding several other features to make it truly useful on 68k Macs. That's where this thread comes into play.
I need suggestions here, and a little more than that, I also need some truly bright thinkers. My ideas are simply a bit too ambitious: to create a bidirectional file sharing solution that also works on old browsers.