Raison D'Etre

The MacCentralCafe Forums and MacCentralCafe Apple/Tech News & Network were created for MacCentral refugees so that they would have a permanent home for discussion, community, and Apple/Technology news, in the spirit of the legendary MacCentral that passed into Macintosh Internet History. MacCentral was a special place, as were its eclectic, technically savvy, and uniquely interesting forum members.

MacCentral was probably the top Mac site, with a potent combination of expertly crafted news, meaningful interviews, expert platform and computing columnists, expert how-to columnists, and, of course, discussion forums.

MacCentralCafe Apple/Tech News & Network presents news from hundreds of different original sources in a wide variety of categories ranging from Apple platform news, Mac how-to's and troubleshooting, and gadgetry; to Silicon Valley gossip, geeky news, and technology; as well as internet gossip, junkPop culture, and funny stuff. The landing page is a news mashup of news items from several of those sources. There are a few blogs, yet meager, but that will grow in content, regarding useful hacks, software, how2s and practices, platform tools, etc. And there are The MacCentralCafe Forums, in the spirit of the MacCentral Forums.

The MacCentralCafe Forums have a 'one bucket' General Discussion Forum, in the spirit of the original MacCentral General Discussion Forum, and is a much faster, modern, power forum. MacCentral originally had a few forums, but devotees only remember one, General Discussion, since that was where the majority of posts landed, from highly technical platform and technology posts, to heated political discussion, to humor. It was by far the most interesting, colorful, and technically savvy forum, with an eclectic, devout following.

Club MacCentralCafe was hastily put together on a Saturday as a halfway house for the MacCentral Forum devout. It was made on the Ning social network platform.

Planet MacCentralCafe has been put together, as a social media platform, but some have a home in Club MacCentralCafe for their blogs, photos, music and videos. So, there are two choices for a social network.

Stan Flack, MacCentral, and MacMinute

Stan Flack founded MacCentral, which flourished for years, but was eventually absorbed and then killed by MacWorld, but the MacCentral Forums were allowed to go on as an obscure link on the MacWorld website, then as a read-only forum January 3 2008, until they finally plugged the plug March 3 2008. After the sale of MacCentral to MacWorld, Stan started another popular Mac News and Discussion site, MacMinute.

Stan Flack, the beloved and esteemed founder of MacCentral and MacMinute, passed away in April 14 2008, and the popular Mac site that he founded, MacMinute, has been graciously shepherded by MacTech.

For a little MacCentral history, see this Wikipedia article.

Credits

MacCentralCafe News is built on the ModX CMS framework, the MacCentralCafe Forums run on the MyBB platform, the KickApps platform powers Planet MacCentralCafe, and Club MacCentralCafe runs on the Ning platform. FeedBurner is the newsfeed service.

Ed Riehl is the publisher and webmaster of the MacCentralCafe media, developed with XHTML, AJAX, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and PHP on the Apache Webserver, on a 12" G4 Macintosh Powerbook, using TextWrangler text editor, ImageWell web image editor, Seashore image editor, Photoshop image editor, Omni Outliner, Noted notepad, TextExpander, Cyberduck FTP client.