HELP, Help, help, blub blub.. Apple IMAC

[silverstude]

Hi all,

To many of you this will seem like gibberish, but I hope there are some "Cognoscenti" out there..

Background:

) My 7 year old PC (64 bit, Win7) lost it's network capability..

) Tried all avenues to regen the network to no avail. Both wi-fi and RJ-45 do not work..

) Tried a PCI internet card and no luck (see above)

) No exact replacement motherboards available...

) New motherboards will use Win10 but I will not ..

) So, I thought the answer was to get a new IMAC. I have an extensive Unix background and presumed the familiar field would be great...

) Had issues getting the large amount of PC backup data available to the IMAC but that's not the problem right now...

) I have to maintain all those web files......

) Tried a simple update using the text editor on the IMAC....

)) the file was transferred to the website using the recommended FTP app...

))) When you view the file on a browser, it errors out because it has alien characters in the 6 lines of text.....

)))) try http://www.studebaker-info.org/aoai/aoai174class.html and view the 'page source'.....

....calling the Apple Help line wasn't productive (not unexpected)

Do anyone of you own an IMAC and know about this stuff??

Thanks

Bob Johnstone

www.studebaker-info.org

Edited May 27, 2016 by silverstude

[cmholm]

Bob,

iMac, and more to the point, OSX guy here. I displayed the linked page and looked at the HTML source, and I'm not seeing anything amiss other than that the layout is pretty plain. Did you end up fixing the character problem?

In general, I suspect the issue was that while the Apple TextEdit application supports a fair bit of text formatting, like Wordpad on Windows, you may have been treating it like Notepad on Windows, which saves text without any formatting or weird, non-printing characters (at least not without significant effort).

The easiest way to prevent this problem from recurring in TextEdit is to go to the "Format" menu and select "Make Plain Text". Thereafter, when you save the file, non-printable (and non-web able) characters shouldn't be an issue.

There are a number of OSX applications specifically designed to deal with source code, including HTML and CSS, and don't have much of a learning curve. You could also use Vi or EMACS in a Terminal window, but if you're not already a Vi or EMACS user, I'm not going to try to talk you into it.

If you want something for OSX that's intended as a source code and/or HTML editor, here are my suggestions:

• TextWrangler, free, http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
• Brackets, free, http://brackets.io/
• Smultron, $10, https://www.peterborgapps.com/smultron/
• BBEdit, $50, http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
• Sublime Text, $70, https://www.sublimetext.com/

Carl

[silverstude]

Hi Carl,

thanks for the tips. It's been a few weeks now and my initial frustration has been dealt with. You were correct regarding the Text/Edit and I've made some customization changes. The best tool is the TextWrangler for what I do and it's been working pretty well. Also had to add a couple lines to HTML files. ( and, there are thousands of files...) but will work things in as time goes by.

Still have to replicate a work flow that is quick and efficient. Desktop links to underlying directories is a concern. I don't like having to duplicate an image file to change it's name when the size is reduced, but 'google is your friend' when it comes to asking for help..

Can't wait to start dictating emails, ;-)

[lschuc]

Bob,

Another text and html editing file that I have used for a long time on Macs is BBedit [ http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ ] . You won't get any strange characters in your html text and it even helps or prompts you to add opening or closing tags, which can save a few key strokes.

For FTP, I have used Transmit [ https://panic.com/transmit/ ]for many years. simply drag and drop.

[silverstude]

Thanks Lou,

Again, things are smoothing out. Just a new paradigm that has to be worked through. One unfortunate item is that the old backup drives from my PC cannot be seen by the Mac, so ever slowly and carefully, using a large thumb drive, things are getting moved over. The Apple Migration Assistant relies on networking the systems, but the network board on the PC is what went south. Just another workaround to deal with..

RJ

[cmholm]

Bob,

If running through resizing and renaming a large number of image files is an issue, you might try GraphicConverter (https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/), free to try forever, if you don't mind the start up nag countdown, and $40 to buy. It offers a batch processing mode where, after the initial setup, you can run a number of effects on a folder full off files in fire and forget mode, including resizing and saving under new names and/or a different folder. I've used it to photo enhance hundreds of GoPro time lapse shots before combining them into an MPEG movie.

As for making the same html edits over hundreds of pages, I had suffered through this on a high school yearbook site I've maintained for 15 years (http://mauiholm.org/zagros). When facing a major layout redo, I finally gave in and wrote a reasonably short Python script that used an HTML template engine ( https://chameleon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). Thus, I could reformat five years of yearbooks, ~1000 pages, by editing 5 or so HTML templates and running one command to crank out the results.

Carl

Edited June 16, 2016 by cmholm

[MARK]

For those that provided valuable help to Bob, thanks, he provides and incredible service to all.

Again, to those who helped, I thank you very much

Mark