Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with paths

How can I rewrite the image paths on my web server?

kirkaracha — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:09:12 -0800

How can I rewrite the image paths on my web server? I recently moved a site into a CMS and different web server. The images are in directories like this:
/daily/2009/05/

The web pages sometimes link to images like this:
[img src="/daily/2009/05/"]
And sometimes they link to images like this (without a leading slash):
[img src="daily/2009/05/"]

That worked fine on the old server, but the paths are different in the CMS on the new server. Can I use .htaccess or something to rewrite the paths?

The Baha'i Religion - Am I missing anything?

unixrat — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:22:25 -0800

I have spent the past two years doing on-again, off-again research into the Baha'i religion. I really like what I see - I'm on the verge of conversion. There is one problem - something that's nagging at the corners of my mind: Why isn't this religion more popular? Is there something that I'm missing that everyone else is seeing? This is a bit of the Wisdom of Crowds mentality, but I have this mental image of a fork in the road with a heavily traveled path on one side and a deer path on the other.

I'm not afraid of going my own way, I'm just looking for a little reassurance that I'm not blind to some obvious problem.

The people I've spoken to have been very nice, the books that I have read have seemed pretty thorough, and I've read all the criticism that I can get my hands on. Yet, the sheer anonymity of it leaves me a bit bewildered.

Help?

Screwed up Flash movie loading/unloading

wexford_arts — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:30:36 -0800

Flash newbie: when I unload a movie by clicking a button inside it, and load a new movie in its place, the new movie always opens in a new window instead of the defined movieclip. Feel free to flaunt your superior knowledge and show me the obvious answer! I have a file called page01.swf that has a placeholder movieclip called mcStepHolder. I've attached the following code to mcStepHolder so that the page loads up an external file (page01_step1.swf) on launch. (This works perfectly):

if(this.mcStepHolder == Number(this.mcStepHolder)){
loadMovieNum("page01_step1.swf",this.mcStepHolder);
} else {
this.mcStepHolder.loadMovie("page01_step1.swf");
}

Here's the problem: on clicking a button inside page01_step1.swf, I want the movie to unload itself and swap in page01_step2.swf. The following code does open the correct file, but inside a new window instead of the parent SWF (mcStepHolder movieclip inside the page01.swf) Here is the code attached to the button inside that page01_step1.swf:

on (release){
unloadMovieNum(this._parent.mcStepHolder)
loadMovieNum("page01_step2.swf", this._parent.mcStepHolder)

}

Yes, I am very new, and am probably doing something mindblowingly stupid. I'm getting one of the Beyond the Basics/Hands On Learning books this week (after I get a few bucks).

Can I get path information out of Photoshop / Illustrator?

miniape — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:15:55 -0800

Bezier Curves: Is there a way I can access the information about a path in Photoshop or illustrator (x,y positions of anchors and control points). I'd like to be able to draw a shape path in photoshop and then use that information as input in a language like Processing or Flash that have functions that take positions of anchor points and handles. For instance, the bezier function in Processing looks like this: bezier(x1, y1, cx1, cy1, cx2, cy2, x2, y2).

Or is there an easier way that I'm just totally missing? I just find it very dificult to make the shapes by inputing numbers and trying to get the shapes right.

Crop in Illustrator like in Photoshop?

pmbuko — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:15:07 -0800

Is there an easy way to crop a rectangular portion of an Illustrator (CS, CS2) document? Basically, I want to select a rectangular -- or arbitrary, for that matter -- area of an .ai file, remove everything outside that area, and shrink the artboard area (file dimensions) down to what remains. The process I've been using so far involves Photoshop and is destructive since it rasterizes the image. This is OK for now since my destination is the web, but I'd like to know if there's a quick way to accomplish this without rasterizing.

I assumed you could just draw a rectangle or shape on top of the image and have its boundaries slice any paths it encountered, allowing you to then select and delete anything in the outlying area, but I wasn't able to get anywhere with that approach. Did I miss something obvious?

Absolute path woes

joshuaconner — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:04:21 -0800

Help me make my removable drive shortcuts not break when plugged into different computers! I have a 5g iPod that I'm using part-time as a removable drive that I run a handful of portable apps off of. I put shortcuts in the top iPod directory ("Josh's iPod") to the different programs (which are in subdirectories within a directory on the iPod called "Portable Apps").

These shortcuts work fine as long as the iPod gets assigned to E:\, but whenever it gets assigned to a different drive letter (like F:\) they break. Is there something I can do to make my shortcut paths relative rather than absolute?

I'm thinking there's gotta be something like the %Userprofile% trick, maybe? Are there other relative paths other than that one? Google strips the %'s out of my searches!

Linking Illustrator Paths Together

odinsdream — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 14:55:29 -0800

How can I draw two or more paths in Illustrator and link them together while preserving each paths' own fill and stroke? Example inside. I'm new to Illustrator, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I've gone through the Adobe documentation, several online tutorials, and the Illustrator CS Bible without finding an answer. Here's an example:

For that, I drew the top path, filled it with green, copied and flipped it, and filled the copy with blue. I manually laid them beside eachother so they appear to be the same object, but what I'd really like to do (and that's an extremely simplified example) is specify that they mathematically share a common edge.

Is there a way to link two paths together like this, or do I really just have to stick with hand-stacking them? I feel like I'm missing some crucial trick that would take me from drawing distinct simple paths to drawing paths that interact with and rely on eachother. What am I missing? Please, feel free to point out anything that might be embarassingly obvious – it's probably staring me right in the face.