Sharing options via internet

Hey guys i was playing around with the Sharing options within my system preferences today and found the "Personal Web Sharing" section. so i turned it on and rang my friend up to see if they could access the address what was given.
it would begin to load but nothing ever loaded. mind you we only let it load for about 10 minutes cos then she had to go out. but i was wondering whether for starters if this works? and how well?

also when i clicked on the "Internet" tab it said
'You cannot start Internet Sharing because you have not selected a port over which to share your connection. is this why she couldnt get the address that i gave her to work? and if so which option to i enable?

i had a friend over who also had a laptop (Windows) and they were able to access the address when i gave to them and they could see what i had put in the "Sites" folder

so please if anyone has done this it would be great if i could have some help as i would like to be able to share files with my friend to save on petrol lol.

Personal Web Sharing is how you turn on Apache, the web server. It'll make your computer able to serve up webpages to the outside world. Internet sharing, on the other hand, is something you'd use if your computer has a direct connection to the internet and you have other computers on your network that want to access the internet too.

Web sharing works brilliantly and I have no problems with it on my computer (along with 50 million other computers - according to netcraft). So yes it should work fine if you want to share files, although FTP would probably be a better option.

Macbook pro: solution to share your internet connection

Allowing Internet Sharing needs to go through a counter-intuitive step on Leopard:

If you get: "You cannot start Internet Sharing because you have not selected a port over which to share your connection" it is because you have clicked on "Internet Sharing" before having selected "Airport" (or another port in the list on the right).

Pressing the "Internet Sharing" button implies that you have already chosen the type of connection you would like to use. It took me some time to understand this and it seems that many people have had this problem.