Fleet Thought

In a site I was recently working on, I found myself hard-coding links to files stored within my Drupal site's "files" directory. If you've ever coded these links before, you know that they normally look something like:
/sites/[sitename]/files/[someotherdirectory]/image.jpg

This can be somewhat painful to add to the site, especially if you have any plans to ever change the domain name of your site. It would really be ideal if you could leave the domain name out of the equation and just write the link in the format:
/files/[someotherdirectory]/image.jpg

This is actually possible to do using the .htaccess file that appears in the root of your Drupal installation. Basically you just need to add a single line:
RewriteRule ^files/(.*)$ /sites/%{HTTP_HOST}/files/$1 [L]

After you implement this rule, you should be able to start writing simpler links to your "files" directory.

Happy coding!

Ms. Cashore,

Thank you for writing Fire. That is all.

Sincerely,
Jill Jarrell

Sorry I've been silent of late but we have been in the throes of relocating from Colorado Springs, CO to Clarksville, TN. Mark has taken a new position in the IT Department with Austin Peay State University. We've been in Clarksville now for about a month and we are slowly settling in. In addition to relocating, I'm currently co-writing a new book for teen librarians and teachers with Tara Cannon (previously of the Pikes Peak Library District). We are so very excited about this book as it focuses on a topic very near and dear to our hearts--teen nonfiction.

So, here's my addition to the Day in the Life of a Librarian meme :)

7:20AM awake and doing all the normal getting ready for work type activities.

9:00AM arrive at work, parking in the overflow parking lot. And lug the huge backpack full of brochures, library card applications and other booth paraphernalia to my desk (My next post will be all about the library skate night at Skate City so stay tuned!).