| Website Tools for Images and Videos |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Tuesday, 26 February 2008 | |
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I am often asked about how to best display photos and videos on a website. There is no best answer. I did my first website in 1995 using Hot Dog as an authoring tool. Now, 13 years later, things are much easier.
About 2/3rds of the web servers on the Internet are Unix/Linux based. Most of the rest are Windows based. There are good reasons for choosing something other than a Windows server, mainly speed and efficiency. TheTooleys.com is hosted on a Linux based server. You no longer need to know how to code in HTML to have a contemporary web presence. Now is the age of Web 2.0 with interactive database driven content. All content is created using your web browser, e.g. Internet Explorer or Firefox. You could simply use one of the popular free web services to host your graphic content. Here are some: 1. Flickr.com (part of Yahoo!) 2. Picasa Web Albums (part of Google) 3. PhotoBucket.com I chose to use a commercial web hosting data center where my site could be customized just the way I wanted it, not a template copy. Cost is $156/year at WestHost.com for the Business Value account. Here are my tools of choice: Main application is Joomla. This is a program that runs on the web server. Check it out at Joomla.org. It's open source and free. If the program doesn't have a function you need, there are a ton of plug-ins (components and modules) that you can easily add. For static photo images, I use another open source application. This one is a stand-alone program called Gallery2. It can be a totally separate website if you want (mine is at http://www.hannahjo.org/gallery2/). But since Joomla can embed any website into a page, you can see my Photo Gallery on the Joomla menu (both on the left side menu as well as the tab menu at the top of each page. Finally, I wanted to be able to have visitors view video shows using Internet standard code. So each video slideshow is included as a Flash file common to all browsers. Most also have a link to a YouTube.com version. There you have it. Nothing too mysterious. The only "special sauce" is in knowing how to take, manipulate and blend images and sound into a living show to delight your family and friends. Comments (0)
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 10 March 2008 ) |
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