FTP is so 20th-century

I’d been having some troubles uploading this site recently – the FTP driver in Radio Userland was having difficulties getting through my router/firewall/cable modem and I’d often end up with just a blank page here.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about WebDAV over the last few days. It’s a protocol which allows web servers to act much more like file servers, and it’s been around for a while. However, it’s now built in to most of the Adobe applications, it comes as standard with Apache 2.0, and Mac OS X can mount WebDAV shares just like any other network file system (albeit rather slowly). It’s still not trivial to set up on an Apache server, because you have to think rather more about permissions and authentication, but once it’s up and running, it’s rather cute.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could abandon this troublesome FTP protocol, which was never really designed for this world of proxies and firewalls, and upload my Radio-generated pages using WebDAV instead? And sure enough, Nicholas Riley has created a WebDAV upstreamer for Radio. If you can read this, it works! Many thanks, Nicholas.

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© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser