Some hosting environments don’t allow access to the xmlrpc.php, which is necessary for Mac desktop blogging applications to work with WordPress sites. These instructions will fix this connection issue, in many instances.
Having trouble installing plug-ins, themes, and WordPress core updates on a localhost WordPress instance? Here’s the most likely cause and solution.
If you wish to run local web services, such as CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV, websites, etc., you may want to connect over SSL. Here are instructions on how to generate self-signed SSL certificates, on Mac OS X that have the CA flag set to TRUE, and which will be accepted my Android devices (which are particularly fussy about how an SSL certificate is cooked up).
OS X has a built in web server. For some users, especially web developers, it may come in rather handy. You can use it for locally hosting web sites (typically for development purposes), for running a local WebDAV server (which may, for instance, come in handy for local syncing of apps like OmniFocus). Here’s how to start and stop Apache on OS X.
If you do web design on your Mac, you may need to create FAVICON files (ICO files). If you use Photoshop, here’s how to save a FAVICON / ICO file on Photoshop CS5, CS6, and CC.