You can display your documents on the Internet — or restrict access to a chosen few within a local area network. Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing makes it a snap.

Here’s how it works: Once you’ve turned on Web sharing (see sidebar) and you’re online, all you need to do is copy a file in HTML format to the Web Pages folder (in the Sites folder in your Home directory, on your computer’s hard disk), and that’s it. You’re done — your page is ready for viewing. Make sure you have someone handy to exchange high fives with.

It’s so easy that even a first-timer can do it (by the way, if that describes you, see “HTML, Anyone?” on this page to learn how you can use your word processing application to generate HTML documents quickly and easily with just a few clicks of a mouse).

Something else you’ll notice about Mac OS X Personal Web Sharing: as server software goes, it’s about as stable as a block of granite. That’s because it’s built on the Apache web server, one of the many industrial-strength, industry-standard technologies that are part of the modern Darwin core foundation underlying Mac OS X.