In a previous post I wrote about Senduit.com, which has a nice, elegant interface for file sharing that doesn’t require you to sign up for an account. I’ve used it some to send video files and other files that are too large for e-mail attachment.
I began looking for alternatives, though, because I have had mixed results with Senduit. Sometimes it requires people downloading files to wait up to 120 seconds for the download to start, and then sometimes Internet Explorer (for those consigned to the Windows world) blocks the download. And I’ve had the uploads time out on several occasions.
So I signed up for the Dropbox private beta, because it looked like it had a nice interface. And for synching across multiple machines, it seemed really slick. I just got into the private beta last week.
The thing I really like is that each file you upload has a URL, so you can link to a video file on Dropbox from your blog. It’s like an FTP server without the complications.
So here’s an example of a video I shot of my daughter Rebekah taking a volleyball off her head during a recent match. Click here to play or right-click and “Save as Target” to download.
The file I put up there was in QuickTime, which some of you Windows users might not have. So here’s another example, of a photo of me with Rebekah, from a year or two ago.
Dropbox is now out of private beta and is available to everyone. A 2 GB account is free, and for about $10 a month you can have 50 GB of storage.
I will probably do a follow-up post with a screencast demo of how to use this for making larger attachments available in your blog posts, but for now you can click the photo and video links above to see how it works on the blog reader side. My later post will show you how to create those links.
In the comments below, please let me know how the download worked for you. Was it relatively quick, or kind of sluggish?
Hey Lee,
I have an appointment Fri morning to teach my senior pastor how to BLOG and use Facebook! Does this mean I get extra credit? Or perhaps can be considered as an adjunct professor?
I still have some video to get to you….and I’ve been using my Flip and have uploaded some to You Tube and embedded in my blog….however, I can’t figure out how to edit the video before uploading. Help!
P.S. The download was relatively quick. Bekah was in the right place at the right time!