Note: This FAQ only answers a few very specific questions which may not be so obvious by reading the preliminary documentation. More will be added depending upon user's feedback.

MacReporter Server uses the MacReporter engine to go beyond the scope of RSS feeds.

RSS is a great emerging standrd because it allows websites to easily and robustly provide content that can be aggregated using a RSS client. However, this requires some work from the webmaster to comply with RSS/RDF. This means that many sites will not be jumping on board and you'll be left helpless.

With HTML feeds, you can retrieve content from just about any site, without having themselves adapting to content aggregators. This is a major advantage because this opens the door to an unlimited number of feeds, from your very own personal site to huge corporate sites that are not willing to use RSS.

This technology requires HTML feeds to be built as a plug-in. Such plug-ins can be built & supported for you by our staff, as a part of our Authoring Kit license or by purchasing an extra Authoring Kit. Please visit our online store for further details about this offer.

MacReporter Server uses the new networking APIs installed with Safari to handle network tranfers. Since it comes installed with late incarnations of Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3, we decided to base MacReporter Server on this technology rather than introducing our own customized solution.

MacReporter Server will try to guess an URL for the web service by looking up the first active network interface on the hosting computer. This may be totally wrong if you are behind a proxy or using NAT. Use this URL with caution, it is mainly intended to give you feedback about the port and service name used by MacReporter Server.

MacReporter Server will try to cleanly dispose of resources when it doesn't need them anymore such as network ports. It may fail to do so if you encounter a serious crash. You can fix this issue by either selecting a new port in the preferences or by restarting your network layer.