I will help explain how to install the free MAMP web server on your Mac.
I received an email from a lady who stumbled upon this blog and was very interested to learn that it is possible to use WordPress on MobileMe hosting. I skimmed over the ways to do this in previous posts and now realise that some more links/info will help others accomplish the same tasks.
Here is the email:
Hi Leon,
I was looking for solutions to hosting a WP blog on Me.com and was nothing short of thrilled to discover your blog as a testament to such a possibility. I’m very keen to perform the procedure on my own blog but reading your posts has confirmed that I’m nowhere near savvy enough. I have some questions I’d like to ask you and I hope to not test your patience too much!
Firstly, you said you “setup Mac and Windows portable web server environments to run my WordPress install locally”. Could you elaborate a little on this process?
If you don’t have the time to answer, that’s fine, and I’d appreciate it greatly if you could direct me to any other sources of information you know of.
Thanks,
Evelyn.
http://www.pilotperson.com
Sure Evelyn, I’ll try. As you may well know by now, WordPress cannot simply be installed on MobileMe. This is because WordPress needs a web server with special features. Features which allow programming code to be executed and web page content to be generated “on-the-fly” (just for you).
I’m sure Apple’s MobileMe servers are more than capable of these functions, they are just not made available to us end-users (aka. paying customers 
).
As a web programmer, I often test web sites on my own computer, having it run it’s own web server which only I can see, ie. not accessible by anyone else on the internet. This is fine for running WordPress, but of course nobody would be able to see your site.
I found that with a few tweaks, the same system can be used to run WordPress on my Mac, while exporting all the posts I make as normal, non-dynamic, static webpages - perfect for dropping into MobileMe!
There’s 2 parts to all of this:
- Setting up your own local webserver
- Customising WordPress to output MobileMe-friendly pages
For setting up your own web server on a Mac, I recommend MAMP which offers free and Pro versions (free is more than enough for what we want to do). There are so many good guides already out there on how to get started.
It’s really as easy as installing most other software on your Mac.
see links below
When you’re ready to customise WordPress, come back here and check out some of my earlier posts which should give you plenty of ideas, and please feel free to email me at leon.stafford@mac.com with any specific questions.
Here is a link for MAMP installation:
http://www.sawmac.com/mamp/
And another for WordPress on MAMP:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2764/leopard_install_local_wordpress_using_mamp/
Cheers,
Leon