I was clearing off my desk today when I found an article I've been meaning to scan and send to somebody -- the story of how my friends almost elected a dalmatian and squirrel to the homecoming court of the University of North Texas in 1989. The alumni magazine wrote a feature on Hector the Eagle Dog and Agnes the Squirrel's campaign, which attracted national media and made a few of the human homecoming candidates very angry.
I can never tell when a file's too big to send in email without aggravating the recipient, so I upload files to my server and email the links instead. I decided to make this process easier by creating a clippings directory where uploaded files show up automatically.
The Apache web server can publish a listing of all files in a directory, as the official Apache site does in its images subdirectory. I wanted to make my clippings page look more like the rest of my weblog, so I found a tutorial on customizing directory listing pages.
First, I created an .htaccess file in the directory and turned directory indexing on with this command:
Options +Indexes
This command only works on servers that are configured to allow users to change options. For security reasons, I turn directory listings off by default, so they only appear when I specifically configure a directory to reveal its contents.
Next, I created header and footer web pages that contain the HTML markup to display above and below the directory listing. These files are identified by two more commands in .htaccess:
HeaderName header.html
ReadmeName footer.html
These web pages are located in the clippings directory. For the final step, I added a description of PDF documents and made sure that the header and footer files are not included in the listing:
AddDescription "PDF Document" .pdf
IndexIgnore header.html footer.html
There's a lot more that can be customized in an Apache directory listing, as the tutorial demonstrates, but for my project it seemed like overkill.
Update: Alternatively, I could've checked to see if the story was already online. Auugh.
