Utilising Online Services

Not long after starting this blog, I also created a website for Jack – not for him to use (as that is just silly), but more for our friends and family to be able to see how he’s getting on. I thought I’d write something here about it, explaining a little about it and some of the online services that I have used to make it work.

There are websites that are designed for new parents to do a very similar thing to what I have done, such as those at mytinybaby.com, but even though they are free to have and to use, I can’t help but be a little cynical about why they’re giving away such a service for free – are they selling on your personal details to third party companies, for the purpose of marketing more baby products? Who knows. Who cares? But me having a personal interest and the ability in doing this stuff, I thought I’d give it a go.

Windows Skydrive
The ever growing collection of photos of Jack are being stored and managed on the Windows Live Skydrive website – this is an online storage area owned by Microsoft, that is available to the general public. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you now get 25GB of free online storage space (it used to be just 5GB) to use for photos, files, documents or whatever and you can also specify whether you want these files private or publically accessible. The idea is then that you can take a photo album (or whatever) and make it available to the people you designate, whether that is the whole world or selected individuals. I chose to make the images I put up online available to the public providing that they came from a particular hyperlink which contains an encrypted key, meaning if you don’t have the password to the website, you won’t have access to the page that contains the link to the images on my Skydrive account.

Originally, I did set out to make myself a online photo storage area directly as part of the website, but why reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it? Skydrive does a great job of holding the photos, and even allows Claire and I to grant other people the access-rights needed to upload their images to our storage area, if need be.

Uploading photos to Skydrive is really easy, i.e. 'drag and drop' easy. The images are uploaded quite quickly and then the various thumbnails, etc are made automatically and without delay, they are available online.

YouTube
The videos available on the website are held by those nice people at YouTube. Basically, I have created an account and uploaded the videos and simply dropped links back into the website that kicks off the video. As YouTube records the number of times each video is played, by periodically visiting the YouTube site and signing onto my account, I can see the hit-count for each clip.

Uploading video clips to YouTube takes a lot longer to do, but that is simply down to the fact that video files are significantly larger in size than photos, and depending upon the length, quality and file format, the file size can vary quite a lot. But I do have to say that despite YouTube being an extremely popular website, I couldn't find the link to begin with that uploads the files... maybe it's just me, but if I couldn't find it, being a geek n' all, I'm sure other people might have backed out by then.

The videos on YouTube are actually meant to be public and shared from the start, which is a little bit against what I have been trying to do with the photos and other content about Jack, but I’m using YouTube in a slightly different way. I have created an account but in a random name that does not link back to anyone particular and have uploaded the videos under this name. The videos are not tagged with anyone’s names or details, and so the videos are just of ‘a baby’ and possibly ‘someone else’ in the footage too, so if someone was unlucky enough to stumble upon them whilst surfing the wide range of videos on YouTube, they wouldn’t necessarily know this was us and our baby, etc.

On Jack’s site, there’s a little slick animation that goes on when you click on one of the videos, which makes the video ‘appear’, but this is just little Javascript ‘lightboxing’ that goes on for effect.

Jack’s website
I made the website itself in classic ASP (Active Server Page for you non-geeks), which basically means the web-server builds each page before sending to you as a visitor to the site (potentially allowing each visitor to see a totally different page, based upon data, the date and time, etc., if need be). The fact that is was an ASP site meant I could implement the password-protected element of the site, which stops people who are just surfing the ‘net the find the photos etc.
The mechanism for the passwording was already in place, as I made it all years ago for the same purpose but for our wedding photos. So, this time around, I wiggled a few wires, pulled a few plugs and was able to reuse it for this.

This website is actually a first for me in a geeky way, as this is my first (proper) CSS website! – The website uses clean and compliant CSS to display itself and *should* be able to be displayed on a multitude of devices, such as mobile phones, notebooks, etc., in a much clearer and accessible way compared to the good ol’ days of making a website with a million nested tables to get image exactly where you needed them to make the website look correct. One false move or a dodgy sized screen to view it on, and the whole thing goes to pot...

I'm not really one to blow my own trumpet, but the result is not a bad effort. The website needed to come together fairly quickly, as I started making it all literally a week or so before the due date back in January! I’ve been back in and modified a few things around a little here and there when I've had a chance, but all in all, I’m quite pleased with it.