Asset Linking Problems

[Nicko304]

We've had reoccurring problems this semester where images and other linked asset paths won't properly show on labs and sometimes, homeworks.

Here's an example of the bug with this file structure:

Using the path ./assets/rotations.gif will show an image on our local IDE (as expected), but not appear on the website after deploying:


Interestingly if you open the dead image's link, the link is https://bytes.usc.edu/cs104/labs/assets/rotations.gif. But the markdown file lives in labs/avl_lab!

Now a fix I found for now is to add the name of the lab into the relative path:

The image won't show on the local IDE anymore, but it will work on the website after deploying:

Obviously this isn't ideal and can be confusing to professors and staff. Considering we didn't have this issue in the past, my guess it has something to do with Professor Goodney changing the host directory of the site on the bytes server back in January 2024, which was to fix deployment issues at the time (or maybe we need a simple restart?).

[goodney]

I'll have to take a look to see what is happening here, perhaps @mredekopp knows more. Are we sure relative links like that ever worked correctly?

As a quick fix you could try NOT using relative paths, so for any image use /cs104/....

[goodney]

As another test, can you try including the image with a Markdown image tag instead of HTML?

[mredekopp]

I generally just use absolute paths: {{site.url}}/labs/avl_lab/img/rotations.gif

[Nicko304]

Hi Professor Goodney and Professor Redekopp, thanks for responding so quick (my original plan was to leave this issue documented for next semester since I'll be graduating next month).

Regarding if relative links ever worked, it appears we used them in the 2023/fall branch labs, but stopped on the 2024/spring branch.

The path /cs104/labs/avl_lab/assets/rotations.gif also seems to work, but {{site.url}} seems to be more preferable.

![rotations](./avl_lab/assets/rotations.gif) also works, but the image won't be centered and looks a little different.

I'll relay this to the other Heads, thanks!