Linking to Files

If you want to link to a PDF (or any other file), Live Editor provides you with the URL that you need.

An important note about the portability of your URLs. We strongly recommend that you set up your own domain or subdomain for use with Live Editor. Only then are you guaranteed full control of the URLs generated by your Live Editor account.

How to access the URL needed for your link

After you've uploaded your video or audio file, find it in the Files section. When clicking through to view the file, you'll see a tab called Publish & Share. Click that.

The first field that you'll see under the Publish & Share tab is labeled Direct URL. This is the value that you need to copy and paste into your hyperlink, email, IM, or wherever you need to use the link.

Hyperlink code for this example would look something like this:

<a href="http://example.liveeditorcms.com/files/resources/4/i1099misc.pdf">[1099 Misc Form]</a>

Warning: do not use amazonaws.com URLs in your links

It is very important that you use the URLs provided by Live Editor under the Publish & Share tab when linking to your files. These are the only URLs that are guaranteed to work.

You may notice that when you click through one of these links, you'll end up at an address similar to this:

http://liveeditor.s3.amazonaws.com/resource_files/data_finals/000/000/004/original/2c52f8d34a33612b229937dcd8b1dc26277c3754.pdf?1355398111

Never point links to this amazonaws.com URL. It could change at any moment and is not guaranteed to work over the long term.

Using a custom domain or subdomain for the link

Out of the box, Live Editor provides you with a subdomain to use for all of your links to your uploaded files. This subdomain will always work. But what if you want to use your own domain name or subdomain to point to your files?

You can add your own domain or subdomain to Live Editor and use that as your primary files URL. See the help document on Adding custom domain names and subdomains for more information.