NVU Tip - Missing Images and Other Linking Issues

[troyzone]

Hi Everyone,

When using NVU or KompoZer (which is just a slightly newer version of NVU), have you ever had your images suddenly disappear from your page once you uploaded it to your web host, even though they had worked previously?

This is a common issue that many users experience. One minute your page is working fine, then you make one small edit to your page, upload it, and suddenly your images disappear.

This often happens because when adding images or other links in your page, NVU/KompoZer has a tendency to create full paths to specific locations on your computer's hard drive for the linked files. Such links won't work online because your computer's hard drive is not available to visitors of your web site, only to you.

Your images have to be linked in such a way that all visitors to your web site will be able to view them. Relative links are often used for this purpose, as they just tell the visitor's web browser where to find the image or other linked file with relation to where the page currently being viewed is located, rather than giving a complete path to the file including the name of the drive it is stored on.

Since relative links aren't as specific, you can have copies of your web site files in multiple places (such as a copy on your computer as well as a copy on your web host) and your page should display properly when viewed from either place, as long as your web site files are all grouped together in the same manner. In other words, as long as their *relative* locations with respect to each other are the same. For more information on adding images to your web page in this manner, see the link at the bottom of this post.

Now, back to the matter at hand.....

There is an option in NVU's or KompoZer's Image Properties page that says "URL is relative to page location". You'll want this option checked in order to have your code link to an image using the relative format, such as src="images/filename.jpg". Sometimes this option is grayed out and unavailable though. Here is a quote from NVU's Help menu regarding this option:

URL is relative to page location: If checked, Nvu converts the URL to be relative to the page's location. This is especially useful if you plan to publish your pages on a web server so that others can view them. Using relative URLs allows you to keep all your linked files in the same place relative to each other, regardless of their location on your hard disk or a web server.

Unchecking this box causes Nvu to convert the URL to a full (absolute) URL. You typically use absolute URLs when linking to images on other web servers (not stored locally on your hard disk).

If you have never saved or published the page, you must first save the page in order to enable this checkbox. (This checkbox is not available if you open the Image Properties dialog box in a message compose window.)

Basically, if you check the "URL is relative to page location" option in each of your image's properties then this should hopefully solve your problem without having to resort to editing the links in your source code using NVU's Source view or a plain text editor such as Notepad. If this box is not checked then NVU/KompoZer has a habit of creating links to images on your computer's hard drive in full path format that will result in missing images once the page is uploaded and viewed online.

Please note that if the above tip does not solve your image problem, you may have other issues that need addressing. For more details on a recommended way to add images to web pages, see the following post in the forum's Website Creation Tool Kit FAQ board:

Adding Images
erichw33.proboards53.com/index.cgi?board=tool&action=display&thread=5333

I hope this tip helps some of the NVU/KompoZer users here resolve their image display issues.

Troy

[Lori G.]

Great info Troy. Thanks for taking the time to post it here.

Lori