Okay, so here’s the thing: I’m trying to figure out what the best way to host large files online for free is.
After some discussions with Dino o’er the duration of the recent outage, I’ve decided to set up a kind of backup of the site, a secondary Aiera that I can quickly “fail over” to in the event that this primary version of it goes down.
I’m thinking of setting up a blog at Tumblr (though I have to check out their categorization capabilities), which will automatically see mirrored to it any and all posts that get entered at Aiera. That’s easy enough to set up; I do it already on other sites. Image handling is already in the process of being outsourced to Flickr…so all that’s left is the files.
One possibility is just using my Windows Live Skydrive account, which gives me 25 GB of free storage accessible via my Windows Live login; don’t worry, though…I can create public-accessible folders. The limitation of SkyDrive is that no file can be larger than about 25 MB, which certainly presents a problem where hosting…oh, I don’t know…Lazarus is concerned.
So does anyone know of any other services out there that allow for the hosting of large files for free? Preferably with a minimum of annoying ads?
Tags: Aiera, Flickr, Tumblr, Windows Live, Windows Live Skydrive
Produced by: Mark Mitchell
Website: Forum posting at the Cartographer’s Guild
This is an ambitious project to create a realistic heightmap of Britannia using such tools as Photoshop, Terragen, and L3DT.
This in turn would be useful for some Ultima project developers, since I know for a fact that tools exist for some game engines (Neverwinter Nights 2 especially) that allow for the automatic creation of terrain based on imported heightmaps.
But that’s not the reason Mark has undertaken this project for himself. As he creates this work, he also wants to consider: “size and scaling of the continent, political and demographic issues, economy and trade routes, [and] geology and land formation.” In that regard, it’s as much an anthropological study as it is a really cool piece of artwork. You can see just how cool by clicking on the project’s image there on the left; that’s a sample/preview image he sent me a couple months back. It can be viewed in somewhat better detail at Aiera’s Flickr page.
Tags: Flickr, L3DT, Neverwinter Nights 2, Photoshop, Terragen, Ultima
I almost forgot to mention that the downloads section for Ultima 2 has been made fully functional again as well. So if you have a moment or an inkling, good reader, check thou it out!
By the way: a few sundry things need to be mentioned.
1) In the comments below, please leave your thoughts as to whether I should convert the image-handling aspect of the site over to Flickr, as I have been doing with my other websites. There’s any number of Wordpress plugins that make it easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy to bring images over into articles here at Aiera, and using the external site also makes it easier to restore images to proper function in the event of my needing to switch ISPs again.
2) I’m in the process of building a redundant backup of all uploaded files using my Windows Live Skydrive account; I’ll start adding links to existing downloads next week.
3) I could really use some assistance with downloads, as they are restored; it would be swell if one or two people could, where possible, check the developer homepages for site content and make sure that Aiera has the most current copy of each remake, patch, and utility.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Tags: Aiera, Flickr, Ultima 2, Windows Live Skydrive, Wordpress
