So you have hundreds of files in a directory and you want to build an index page with links to each one? If you’ve ever built such a page with Dreamweaver, then you know how time consuming this can be.

A simple trick is to open the directory with FireFox – providing browsing is authorized and there is no index/home file. If you’re using relative links, you can also open the local version of the directory on your hard drive.

Copy the content from the page and paste to an empty Dreamweaver page, you should now have a table based list of links. With a bit of search and replacing, you can turn the table to a list in little time.

We’ve tried this in the Windows Environment with success using Firefox and Dreamweaver 8.

The Mac OS has proven a little harder. Firefox nor Safari provide the proper interface to obtain an HTML copy of the viewed directory. This where Internet Explorer 5.2 for mac comes in handy – this is why keeping old software is always a good idea (given the fact you cannot download it anymore from Microsoft – If you deleted your old copy, try here) !
To open the directory you want to view, start by opening an image or html file in the desired directory. Remove the file name from the URL and you should get a directory listing. View source, copy, and paste in code-view in Dreamweaver : you now have an HTML table with the relative links to all the files in that directory.