2. Embed on your Blog/Website and provide download/play links
3. Save your hosting bandwidth and space
4. Get 99.9% uptime even with 1000s of users online at a time
A few months back, Microsoft introduced a new feature for all those who have a live/hotmail email account (which is free by the way). This feature was named Skydrive. It gives you a 25 GB of free online hardisk. But mind you, this is not just a hardisk, it’s a first step to move towards cloud computing and let you feel the ease and joy of using cloud computing. All those website/blog owners who have trouble paying to ever increasing space and bandwidth for their website or blog and yet suffer from server crashing due to heavy user load on shared or virtual server can now get rid of all of these problems using skydrive.
Live account:
I assume, almost everybody has a live/hotmail account, but if you don’t do make one, it’s free. If you need to make a separate live account for your blog/website, for example Your-Blog@live.com, then go directly to skydrive (skydrive.live.com) home page and Sign Up.
The Public Folder:
When you login to your skydrive, you’ll see four categories of folder whose names are self-explanatory. We will upload our files in PUBLIC folder only because to access that folder one doesn’t need to know the password of your live account, just a link to this folder will suffice.
Start uploading Data; images, audios, videos, eBooks etc in this folder. You can make sub folders and organize your data as if you are working on your local hardisk.
For most of the blog/website holders the main bandwidth eater are images. So can rid of this problem, by uploading the images to the skydrive public folder (or in any sub folder in public folder) and just paste the link of it in the page.
Mind you, Skydrive is fast, the data and images load lightening fast from it, however, if you use images from another website, that site may crash.
Uploading and getting permanent static links:
Just click add files in any folder and upload them. Note: you can load a file up to 50MB. Let’s hope Microsoft will increase this limit when competition gets stronger. But for most of the use 50MB per file is perfectly fine for audio, images and eBooks. Videos can also be uploaded in parts, just like YouTube.
In any folder, you’ll see the contents of that folder. Click on any file. A separate page will open that will provide options for the file.
Link:
Right click the file and click on COPY-LINK-LOCATION. This is the static direct link to the file. You can remove “?download” at the end of the link if you want to. Provide this link in your website. When user will click on this link, the skydrive will not open, but a dialog box will appear for download. Normal users may never know that this file is on skydrive, yet they’ll enjoy a very high downloading speed.
Embed:
In file’s page, click on embed on the top right. Skydrive provides 3 cool graphical representations to embed the file in your website. Choose any one, copy the code and put it in your website.
The file download link will appear in same graphical manner on your website as you are seeing it in skydrive.
Playing media in your website, streaming from skydrive:
Everyone wants to put their some media on their website, for which most of the users use YouTube. Using skydrive you can offer streaming media to your users. For example you have an audio file in your skydrive, you can offer it to download as well as you can provide online streaming (which is the order of the day) to users.
Audio:
Most of the players you find that gives online streaming use relative link i.e. the audio file is situated on your server. However, there are some free players that also support static permanent links to stream from. One such is a free flash player from PremiumBeat (http://www.premiumbeat.com/flash_resources/free_flash_music_player/). As we are using direct links from another servers, we’ll be using the last two, i.e. Multiple Tracks Flash mp3 Player and Multiple Tracks Flash mp3 Player with Menu. Both these players take an XML file in which we give the link to a single or multiple tracks. Click on Instructions & download to use it.
See them in action:
1. Multiple Tracks Flash mp3 Player (http://islambychoice.org/scholars/awlaki/lectures/hur.html)
2. Multiple Tracks Flash mp3 Player With Menu (http://www.islambychoice.org/scholars/awlaki/lectures/hereafter.html)
Video:
In the similar manner, you can stream videos using skydrive. On such player is JW FLV Media Player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/)
This is the essence of cloud computing, i.e. use resources from the cloud and pay as little as it seems almost free. The hits and processing are controlled by skydrive and you do not need to worry about anything related to hosting or space.