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Career URL

With the ECN always moving forward with the newest and most powerful hardware, it is not uncommon for machines to be retired like the recent en.ecn, and the soon to retire cernan.ecn. This situation can cause stale URL's. For example if your homepage URL was http://en.ecn.purdue.edu/~bob/, every link to your page is now broken with the retirement of that machine. This does not have to happen. We encourage you to use http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~bob/ as your URL rather than the one with your machine name. This change is made possible by using the URL field in your PH record. ECN's Kyler Laird has implemented a mechanism which uses this field to make career URLs possible. Keeping this field updated will allow you to use the non-host-specific URL, no matter where your page moves: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~bob/.

If you create links to, and give out only the non-host-specific URL you need only update the URL field in your PH record, when you must move to a new location. This is much more efficient than finding bad references to your page and contacting every maintainer. The non-PH approach will leave many broken links and confuse information seekers, regardless of how tenaciously you try to communicate your move to the world. So, reduce broken links and your workload, by registering your URL with PH and using http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~XX/

For more information on using PH see: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/ECN/FAQ/ph/

• obtain your PH password
• set URL field
• set alias to your login

Additionally, within your webpages remember to use relative URLs for files within your website. When the links to your own files are relative and your public-web directory gets moved to another machine, all your links will continue to work because the interior structure of your site has remained undisturbed. These are examples of a relative URL for a gif image located in the same directory as the current webpage
<a href="picture.gif">Mom</a>

or in a subdirectory
<a href="Images/picture.gif">Mom</a>

or up a directory
<a href="../Images/picture.gif">Mom</a>

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