RasterWeb!

Being someone who has not followed Atom as much as the next super-geek, I’m clueless as to how enclosures are handled… I mean, I could have sworn someone was just namespacing in RSS 2.0 and using the <enclosure> element, but I find no docs on that… (And since Mark ain’t around to help with this…)

I guess there are “Atom enclosures” in the 0.8 draft…

Should I be using this?

  <content 
   type="audio/mpeg" 
   src="http://foo.com/foo.mp3" />

Or perhaps this?

  <link 
   rel="related" 
   type="audio/mpeg" 
   href="http://foo.com/foo.mp3" />

I think they both pass the validator fine, but that doesn’t tell me what I should really be using or doing.

Searching gave no good results, and IM to smart people gave no solid answers… Argh… (Maybe in another 10 months I’ll have an answer.)

Oh yeah, it looks like the WordPress solution was to just use a function named rss_enclosure in the wp-atom.php file, which as you might guess, does the RSS 2.0 thing with <enclosure> in an Atom 0.3 file. I think I’d call that a bug…

Update: My (test) Atom 0.3 Feed with Enclosures.

The videobloggers (and Freevlog) get my thanks on this one. I figured I should make a post on this since I’ve made two comments on it recently…

The Internet Archive will provide storage for your files, because they are “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form” and the chances of the Internet Archive sticking around seems pretty good… The problem is that the time between uploading a file and having it available can be 24 hours. That’s where Ourmedia comes in. Ourmedia provides “free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches” and your files are actually stored in the Internet Archive, but the time between upload and having your file available is much faster. How much faster? My last 2.4 mb upload to Ourmedia took about 10 minutes. Yes, in 10 minutes the file was uploaded and I had the URL for it from the Internet Archive. Sweet!

Ourmedia also makes it really easy to license your work, choosing a Creative Commons license, or whatever other license you might want. They’ve been working on improvements and even in the last two weeks I’ve seen things getting better.

So, the bottom line: free hosting for your podcast or videoblog files (as well as other files.) This sort of solves that bandwidth problem… (It works for tinkernet.)

Are there any downsides? Well, if you really like the raw log data and stats, you may need to do a little extra hacking to get what you need. In theory you could get the URL of your media file on archive.org, and then create redirects on your own site so that requests go to your site, get logged, and the clients get the file via redirect to the actual URL. I imagine a nice little web app or WordPress plugin could do that quite easily…

Update: See JD Lasica’s post on Ourmedia…

Old Buddy Dave asks:

What if I wanted to get 100 t-shirts with a simple logo to show up in Seattle on Thursday, and didn’t mind spending some money to do it. Do you think there’s a way to do it? Seems for enough money there must be a way to do it.

Man, where were people like you 12 years ago! I mean, this is pretty much the kind of question people would ask me, though there was never any mention of money, and I occasionally I had more than 4 days to do it.

This is what you do: Find someone with time on their hands, who happens to be a friend, or likes you, or wants money. Give them the design, or have them do the design, burn a screen, get the shirts, ink, etc. (it will help if they have a screen-printing machine, homemade or not) and then help them print the shirts, hang ’em to dry, take ’em all to a laundromat and throw ’em in the dryer for a cycle. (It worked for All You Can Eat.)

If you don’t like the DIY method I’m sure there are companies that could do it. I say that because I used to work for one, and if someone showed up and said “for enough money there must be a way to do it” we’d sure as hell git ‘er dun.

Also happened on my birthday, the wedding of Dan(iel) Gatewood, which meant I saw a whole bunch of people I haven’t seen in a long time, which means the Where Are They Now is due for a very large update…

As soon as I can remember all the details that is…