I need input from you all about the usefulness of the footbag.org video gallery as so many other options have presented themselves since I first created that system.
When I first created the footbag.org video gallery, it was truly the only place anyone could get free hosting of videos (especially full quality ones), and was a central repository that we could make it easy to share with other footbaggers etc., etc. yadda yadda.
But at this point, there are so many better solutions out there (not the least of which, obviously, is YouTube now that they offer higher quality, etc.).
In fact, the "gallery" on footbag.org isn't only a hosting system for videos -- it's also an index for videos that are hosted off the site! Nobody uses this feature, but it's pretty robust and has been there since the start. In other words, we could keep the footbag.org gallery going, but we could just remove the ability to upload new videos -- and instead, use it as a way for users to index all their videos on other sites (wherever they may be) so people can easily find them, etc. and link them in with events like we offer today, etc.
But if people still think actually uploading videos is critically important as well, that's good to know. I just don't know how valuable all this is to people.
The reason it all matters is real costs of keeping all this stuff going, and improving it (fixing bugs, adding features, etc.) if it's going to be used a lot more into the future.
I don't think anyone realizes that fully half the hard costs IFPA spends on our internet presence each year is on both the hosting of and the bandwidth for downloading videos from our mirror. We pay for all that stuff -- nothing in this world is free.
But there's also the issue of maintenance, backups, and the general overhead of such a big and complicated application on footbag.org that I personally have to spend many, many hours dealing with.
One of many examples is that I've been redesigning the gallery for a long time now -- my redesigned version removes the need for people to invent a keyword for each set they create (a stupid requirement, I don't know what I was thinking) and makes it more turnkey to add and edit your videos online. But to finish that redesign is literally at least 6 more months of part-time work on weekends for me. I could accelerate it, but I have so many other projects to work on (such as moving the entire footbag.org service to a new set of machines -- no small feat that will take literally a month of working all weekend on it once I start), and it's just not falling out very high on my priroity list.
So I'm soliciting input from you folks -- the ones who are the most avid users of the gallery upload and download service. Please do not suggest new features -- I don't need new feature suggestions. Just please weigh in on whether or not you find its mere existence valuable, whether you feel strongly that I should invest the ridiculous amounts of time and energy needed to improve it (not to mention just keeping it going), and if you have ideas for ways to help me (i.e., you're a grade A php coder and want to help me with a massive rewrite of the gallery
), etc.Thanks.
Steve Goldberg
