Attach any information to an Address Book entry

Oct 11, '04 09:03:00AM

Contributed by: Pmac

A friend of mine recently asked me how to add multiple photos to Address Book entries. In the end, I came up with a simple solution which makes use of OS X's built-in server. Go to Systems Preferences -> Sharing, and enable Personal Web Sharing, making a note of your personal website, in my case http://10.0.0.8/~myname/. Then open Microsoft Word and make a new Web Page from the Project Gallery (I would have liked to use something more sophisticated, but unfortunately, I know nothing yet about authoring web pages). Insert some pictures or whatever, and save the site as Documentname (as you wish) in your ~myname/sites folder. Then, in Address Book edit mode for your person, make the homepage entry in the format http://10.0.0.8/~myname/Documentname. Exit edit mode.

Now you can click on the homepage link in any Address Book entry and see all the photos or other webthings you want! It's a shame that Address Book only allows one homepage entry in edit mode, so you won't have immediate access to the person's real homepage, but I guess you could just include it as a link in the page you just made. Since the Sites folder is accessible to any user on the machine, other users could use these pages for their Address Book entries, too, if they wished.

[robg adds: If you're worried about the security of your served pages, you'll want to protect them with an .htaccess file There are a couple of hints here which might help, or you can read that section of the manual on Apache's website. Also, while you can't add a second home page field that works as a link, you could add another general field (some type of phone), then click on the arrow next to the new field's name and select Custom from the pop-up -- this will let you rename the newly added field, and you could then store another URL in it.]

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