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Referencing Files from Yahoo! Web Hosting Securely

Now that hopefully most of you you have your stores secured (if not and need help, we offer a Secure Storefront Preparation Service here), you may have been faced with the question of how to reference files (images, CSS, JavaScript, src) if those files are stored on your Yahoo! store's web hosting account. Obviously using the old HTTP: method won't work, so something like this

< img src="http://site.ytimes.com/image.jpg" />

will not work. Nor can you simply change the http: part to https: , because as of this writing, only the store editor portion of a Yahoo! Store can be made secure, the web hosting portion cannot.

First a side note: if this sounds totally Greek to you because you have never heard of the web hosting part of your Yahoo! Store, you may have a legacy Yahoo! store account and not a Merchant Solution one. With a legacy store account you will only have the store editor part and no hosting account, in which case none of this applies to you.

The good news is you can still use hosting, just house everything inside the /ssl folder on your web hosting. You can put any files or entire folder structures there, just like you can on regular hosting. Then, when you reference the files, you have to use an alternate URL like this:

https://p9.secure.hostingprod.com/@site.ytimes.com/ssl/somefolder/...

The number before the word "secure" may change from store to store, but you can find out what the secure URL for your particular store is by trying this in your browser:

http://site.yourstoredomain.com/ssl (note the http: and NOT https: here)

This will automatically "flip" over to the correct secure URL, so all you have to do is reference all files from there using this secure URL from now on.

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