easiest way to make minor web edits on a mac

ok, I admit I'm a pc guy

[figment88]

Hey, I need to show some mac people how to make minor text edits on a website. Just real simple things like find a date and change it.

What's the easiest way to do this on a mac? I figure I need a simple text editor and a simple FTP program. Are these built into the OS? Are there popular freeware ones to download?

Any help would be greatly appreciated because the first time I used a mac it took me over an hour to figure out how to get the floppy out and that involved a paperclip :)

[too much information]

Well, fortunately the mac has evolved a bit since the paper clip. :)

What you want is BBEdit. That's what I use to do my sites. There is a search feature that will make you a bit jealous if you are used to Notepad or Wordpad.

As far as FTP, I use Fetch. I've heard that you can connect using Finder (Go>Connect to Server) but I never got that to work. Fetch is really easy to use, just drag and drop. If you register it (and it's cheap) it will remember your login settings.

You could use the default text editor, but BBEdit is just very nice.

Good luck

[timster]

All hail BBEdit. I love it. But in case you weren't looking to *buy* a Text Editor...

There's a radical difference between Mac OS 9 (with the rainbow apple in the upper left corner of the screen) and Mac OS X (with the blue apple).
Which are you using, or is it both?

(If you're using OS X, you've got a whole box of Unix goodies hiding under the hood, in case you're interested.)

[figment88]

Thanks for the tips. I actually failed on this one.

I decided after talking with the people that they weren't very computer saavy, so I didn't feel comfortable installing new software on their machines.

[Agitprop]

Another vote for BBEdit. I've been using it to crank out websites since v2.5 in the mid 90s and it still works a treat. BTW it has Grep and AppleScripting so you can automate your search and replace strings across sites or files. Also has built-in FTP so you can edit files on the server without downloading them - good for minor fixes on the fly

[jamesa]

FWIW there's a free version of BBEdit (barebones.com).

On OS X TextEdit is built in. If you use TextEdit, first go to the Format menu and select Make Plain Text because the default is RTF (this can be set in the prefs as well).

On OS 9 just use SimpleText.

Regarding Freeware, a great source for Mac (and Win) free/shareware is versiontracker.com