Is it acceptable to link to pages of my site from elsewhere?

My site has few visitors and the money ran out, so rather than just pulling the plug altogether, I’m giving free hosting a go in the hope that it might be viable. I have a few links to particular pages of my site from Quora (relating to relativity), but they don’t work any more. When I type in the address in a browser, I get a 404 error instead of seeing the page unless I include the .htm or .html at the end (but attempts to edit the links at Quora to add either of those extensions fail as it doesn’t seem to be able to handle them). Is it normal here to need to include those extensions to link into a site? I’ll attempt to put two links here for people to test, one without the extension and the other one with it: magicschoolbook.com/science/Lorentz and magicschoolbook.com/science/Lorentz.htm

Yes it is!, Lorentz.htm is a file, whilst Lorentz is a directory, so to have Lorentz to point to a file, you would create a directory under science/Lorentz, then add Lorentz.htm as an index.html file in science/Lorentz.

Basically it is normal

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Thanks for your relpy. So the way things worked at the previous webhosting company may have been an anomaly rather than there being anything wrong here. I’ve had another go at editing a link to it from Quora and it does actually accept the .htm - it just looked as if it was failing because it no longer converts the link into the text that’s displayed at the top of the browser when you visit it, which is its normal way of indicating that it has linked successfully. Anyway, it looks as if all my old links will just have to remain broken unless I can find time to hunt them all down to fix them.

Ok :slight_smile: Don’t forget to mark this as solved!

I’ve been looking for a way to do that but can’t see the route to it.

Well if your looking to indicate that the links are succesful (Sorry i am a bit distracted), But use OG or meta tags to show.

Ah - I posted this under “other discussions” rather than “hosting support”, so that’s why there’s no option to mark it as solved.

@linguist - try it now :slight_smile:

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I’ve found a reasonable workaroud for the problem which means I don’t have to update old links into the site. Thanks HaydenANG for giving me a clue as to how to do this. I created new folders with the same names as the files (but obviously without the .htm or .html extensions) and then I put copies of the actual files inside them, so people who look them up from old links now see a directory list and they can click on through to the actual page from there.

(Now I just have to fix the actual pages - some alignment bugs have got into them, perhaps due to css problems, but no one else can help fix that.)

But maybe, we could help you with that. Just post a new topic about your problem and we will help you!

Thanks, but it’s a really weird issue which I can’t make sense of at all and which is best tackled just by eliminating the reliance on the tiny css files altogether, and that’s worth doing as it will also reduce the load on the server. I’ve already modified the file worst affected by this and it makes it much more robust…

I’ve found a better solution which will completely solve the problem for anyone else who might have it too: I create a new folder with the same name as the file, then put a copy of the file in that folder as before, but then I change its name to index - this makes it load directly instead of showing a directory, so people clicking on the old links don’t have to hunt for it amongst its associated files and click through to it.

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As said above

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Sorry - I missed that crucial point before - it was too far ahead of what I was thinking at the time. But I’ve caught up now. Thanks again.

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