Just like the neighbor's cat in your kids' sandbox...

June 22, 2008 7:06 PM

What am I doing to my links pointing to images in a private directory that prevents me from seeing the pics in Dreamweaver CS3 Design mode?

Searching Adobe's Knowlegebase and Google yields a flood of others' issues with setting up passworded sites or Dreamweaver forgetting FTP login info and I can't narrow the results to the problem I'm having.

I just started building a web site and I'm rusty in HTML and am learning CSS. After I edit the code, I do like to check it out in Design view. Currently, I'm uploading things to a private directory (passworded .htaccess on a Zeus server not managed by me) so my business partner can see pages before the site goes "live." Viewing the site through a browser, one is prompted to enter the name and password to see this directory's content. No problems there. I have no troubles with file management in DW's FTP prog or in FileZilla, either.

Suppose the page I'm working on is located at http://www.[mydumbsite].com/public_html/sandbox/mydumbpage.htm . "Sandbox" is the passworded directory. My stylesheet for CSS is located in the same directory and the page refers directly to mydumbstylesheet.css . The pics reside below "sandbox" in folders "dumbimages" and "dumbimages/dumbthumbs." The stylesheet's effects on my .html pages show up in Design mode. The images do not. When it's all said and done, the images ARE there on the site and appear in the final product. I would just like to know what I'm doing or not doing that keeps me from being able to preview.

How do I refer to the image locations the short way (vs. "http://www.[mydumbsite].com/public_html/sandbox/images/dumbpic.jpg") so DW is not blocked access? Or Is there a way to tell DW to prompt me to get into pw'd dirs in preview mode?

Any other methods/advice (other than "OMG don't use THAT program, I write code with Sith blood on tree bark") are welcome.

Thanks!

posted by bonobo to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I find your question a little confusing. Do the images show up OK when looked at on the web server? That's not clear to me.

What do the URLs of the images look like, in the CSS file?

Is your local copy of this site actually defined as a Site in Dreamweaver, or just a bunch of files?

One possible explanation, if you can see the images on the website but not in Drewmweaver's WYSIWYG view, is that your urls are root-relative, i.e. they look like this: "/sandbox/images/foo.jpg" with a slash at the start. Root-relative urls don't work on a regular PC/Mac, only on a web server. That's why Dreamweaver has the Sites thing, which makes local code behave as if it's on a server.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 9:12 PM on June 22, 2008

Yup, Ambrose!

I came back to announce I discovered wonkiness between where my local Site stored images and where the relative url pointed. I think I have it all ironed out now.

BTW, the pages and their respective images worked just fine on the server.

I still don't understand why, when the full URL to a remote server image was used, the pics were missing in Preview. I'll just make sure I use (correct) relative links on everything from now on out.

Thanks.
posted by bonobo at 9:34 PM on June 22, 2008

I'll just make sure I use (correct) relative links on everything from now on out.

You can do that, but there are plenty of situations where you do want to use an absolute link. For example, if you had an include that gets used in more than one folder, a "/images/[whatever].jpg" type url will be sure to find the image no matter what folder the request is made from.

Also, if you ever move a file from folder to folder, relative links will break but absolutes will be fine.

If you really want to preview as it will be live, you need to install a server and then view your site on your computer at http://localhost:8080/[your site].
posted by drjimmy11 at 10:50 PM on June 22, 2008