Tips for managing regional includes for county topic pages

When you make a link just by browsing for the page in FrontPage - particularly when making a link to something within the nwregion web space, FrontPage will usually just use what's known as a "relative" link path in the link address. In the case of the one that was broken, it showed as this:

Home Business Alliance/HBA.htm

The location of the linked page is defined relative to the location of the page the link is on. So starting from /nwregion/biz/ it looks for the Home Business Alliance directory, then the file HBA.htm. However, when this include section becomes part of another page such as the Andrew Co. biz page, then the link address is interpretted relative to the location of the Andrew biz page. The result was looking for the HBA page here:

http://outreach.missouri.edu/andrew/Home Business Alliance/HBA.htm

which doesn't exist.  

For links within the regional include pages (ie nwregion/biz/biz-include.html) it's critical that the URL either start with http://outreach.... OR that you use the absolute server path.

Here's an example:
The link to the HBA page wasn't working because the link on the biz-include page used this URL:
Home Business Alliance/HBA.htm which is a "relative" URL,

So, you could either link it as
http://outreach.missouri.edu/nwregion/biz/Home Business Alliance/HBA.htm
(this is the fully qualified URL)

OR

/nwregion/biz/Home Business Alliance/HBA.htm

(this is the absolute path)

and it would work. The leading slash on the second option tells the browser that the file is on the same server, but to start from the beginning of the server's directory path to start looking for the file, rather than from the current location of the page where the link is.

Btw, if the links above are not complete -- everything after Home is not linked, you are observing one reason why it's really better not to use spaces in file and folder names. The other reason is this:

http://outreach.missouri.edu/nwregion/biz/Home%20Business%20Alliance/HBA.htm

That's how it looks copy-pasted from most browsers. The intention of making the words separate and clear by adding spaces is actually befuddled now by the browser inserting the ascii value equivalent %20 placeholders for the spaces.

So, the moral of the story is, when you add a link to those include pages, use the full URL or the absolute path, then just double check that it works by going to a county page and clicking on the link.

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		Kate Akers  akersk@missouri.edu Last revised: 12/12/06