Warehouse of images

RapidWeaver Classic Stacks
1

All:
New to RW… Its good so far. My question is around warehouses. I have read most of the posts… I think I understand the concept, but missing few details in translation.
Examples are best so here we go.

So let’s say I develop websites for clients. So do I just need one warehouse e.g.
server.bdserver.com/warehouse

Then on client website www.clienta.tld I just link the image from server.bdserver.com

I can see benefits of this as central place for images but if my server goes down the images don’t work.

Does RW some how copy the image from the central server?

OR

Do I create a warehouse on every client website e.g.
www.clientb.tld/warehouse

Maybe just simple I do it just like this would help me…

Brent Dacus

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Might check out this post.

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Thanks I did… maybe I need to read it slower…:grinning:

It seems to talk about my first scenario.
Thanks

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I make a folder for each client on the server their site is hosted on.

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Brent,

You can do it either way (folder on each client, master folder on your server area). But I would highly recommend doing this for each client on their own hosting area. It’s easy to FTP all relevant materials and now they have them on their own site. And it can certainly be weird if someone tries, for example, a download link that seems to go to a site very different from your clients (i.e. your web area).

It’s a bit more work for you but better overall. What if someone wants to store lots of stuff at their site? Why should you pay for the hosting? What if someone wants to use a different designer in the future, or more likely, they want to edit for themselves in the future? In both scenarios it’s better if the materials area already at their site.

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I’ve just started using flickr to host my images. Not sure if people think this is a good or bad idea.

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Ok the next logical question is do you do this for other things? E.g. PDF, fonts and videos aka other file types.
If yes do you use folder structure like
Warehouse
PDF
Fonts
Video

OR
All separate

In other words is warehouse for any non code type file?

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If you do want to use a central service for your warehouse Will @willwood talks in the free book above about Amazon S3 service.

Also don’t forget about SSL. If you’re going to want a secure site (and you do) make sure you get that going early in the process. Otherwise you’ll be making a lot of changes from http to https for everything you warehouse.

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Brent: This probably depends on how much “stuff” you have. At most I have 30 to 50 things in the warehouse for any one site. So I don’t make any subfolders: no need as I can easily find things. But I can imagine if you had 500 things then subfolders makes a lot of sense.

I’m not sure why you’d put video in: Vimeo and YouTube both do a great job of optimizing for the web. So I simply upload to Vimeo and use embeds. I suppose if you have very short videos that you want to use in a banner or header area then that’s different.

For larger files (long audios and other things) I do use Amazon S3. It’s a great service. But I’m not sure you want to set this up with each client.

I also share a lot of PDFs. I’m zip them first so they become automatic downloads. But there’s also a case for letting the PDF initially be viewed in the browser, and then folks can download on their own if they want. You just want to have a consistent strategy here. I’m not sure either approach is better, but not being consistent would probably be confusing to users.

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Why is it a bad idea?

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If you rely on a 3rd party (Flickr etc) to serve content for your site you run the risk of waking up one morning and finding no content on your site a a friendly ‘revised terms of service’ email in your inbox.
A number of us have experienced this or similar, these services rely on users visiting their site to see your content, if too many people stop visiting their site as the content is now being viewed remotely they change how things work to prevent remote viewing.
The other problem is that if they upgrade/revise the code on their site then the stack you relied on to serve the 3rd party content stops working, this is very common and requires the dev to rework their stack(s) for existing users but without any income (existing users) to cover it.
There has been many stacks that brought us Twitter, Facebook, Google/Picassa images etc etc that have all stopped working and became financially impossible to maintain.

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Relying on 3rd parties to serve any content on your website is a bad idea on any day of the week. If it’s a business site, even worse.

If you own or produce the content, you should be hosting it (IMHO).

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Surely Flickr/Google images operates like Youtube/Vimeo doesn’t it? Why would they give out so many share/embed options?

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There are huge benefits to YouTube, and especially to Vimeo. Perhaps most important is they optimize how your video plays on the web. This is a great feature. Plus they serve as a storage area for your videos. And much more of course. Videos take up a lot of bandwidth so the advantages offered by YouTube and Vimeo outweigh any potential disadvantages.

… on the other hand images are relatively small in size, easy to warehouse, easy to share directly. So why use the other services? In addition images won’t load quite as fast via embedding, and things can change in the future.

… while it’s true that YouTube or Vimeo may also change in the future the “need” for these services is much greater than the “need” for image services for amateurs. (There are professional image sharing services that cost money and surely are worth the money for professionals.)

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