How can i hard-wire a link, in blocks, using $base_url or something similar?
Hard wired to what?

Personally I like to hard wire my URLs the the root of the site. If my site is always a full domain name as wwww.mysite.com The url would be:

&lt;a href='/archive/program-archive-2012--2013'&gt; Archives&lt;/a&gt;    


This is relative to the root of the website. Which makes sense to me. You can move your site to a new domain, www.mysite2.com, and this Path will still work.

If you move your site to a sub-directory later then .htacess BaseRewrite rules can still allow this to work.

I find trying to make a url work for any combination of directory prefixes or a subsite in a folder, etc .... to much of a pain to deal with.