Follow-up to Directory Browsing with Radio

A couple people have written in about my directory browsing post earlier today. Some thoughts:

Rogers Cadenhead reports that “The Python Community Server, the open source clone of the Radio Community Server at http://www.pycs.net, turns off directory browsing by default.”

If you put index.txt in your “gems” folder, nothing will happen. This is because the “gems” folder disables a function in Radio called “rendering” – by which Radio transforms a simple text file into an HTML file and then uploads it to your web site. The gems folder is for any files you specifically want Radio to leave alone… so we need to create an HTML file called index.html that we can save in the gems folder. I’ve created one – download gems_index.txt (right-click, select “save as”) and save it into your gems folder. Rename it index.html (in the gems folder), change the URL from http://your.blog.here/ to your blog URL, and Radio will take care of the rest.

By the way – rendering is a little-known feature in Radio. Create a folder in the “www” folder in Radio. Save a text file in there, wait a few seconds, then go to your web site. You’ll have a file formatted with your site template – containing the text from the text file. Play with it a bit – it’s a great way to save e-mails to the web, create static files for your web site (it’s how I created the about page for this site), and other easy ways to add HTML pages to your site without thinking about it.