Space Limitations

From ICCC

For this website we have space limitations, and we do use a fair amount of disk space, mainly with large Video files, although we also have a lot of Photos

The figures

See quota stats. Look for 'soc_rcc_canoe' and the 'percentage blocks' column.

Happily at the beginning of the 2006/2007 year we were given more disk space, so we're currenlty just about two thirds full.

Ralph's created a script to count up all our files and figure out where the space has gone. Click here to run the script, but you'll have to wait while it counts 'em all up for you.

Solutions

With the panic over, we dont need to do any of these particularly. However some of them would be a good idea anyway.

Request more space - The union gave us more space, we just needed to ask, and then to wait a little while. This makes sense since we are putting up content which generally promotes the union, and brings in web traffic, and disk space is cheap.

Delete some videos. - Videos are by far the biggest files on the website. Delete videos and whammo! you've got disk space again. ...but it's a shame because videos are nice.

Reorganise videos - We should make sure we are using sensible compression on the videos. Avoid putting any AVI files on there (not much compression). We should also edit the videos into just the more interesting clips. This takes quite a lot of effort though.

We should maybe keep track of who has original source video footage, and higher res versions of the editing videos. Maybe we should collect them all into one (offline) place so that we know who to ask to burn a CD. The original original source is very large indeed, so even then we would be wanting to throw away some information.

We could use youtube.com to host some videos. We could install a MediaWiki youtube extension to embed the youtube flash on pages here (all in row in the videos page, and also on trip reports) Disadvantage of youtube is that they impose limitations on video length resolution and are maybe going to get more strict with backing music copyrights. They might even impose in-video adverts in the future (yuck!)

Delete Photos - We have a lot of very old photos. It seems a shame to purge these from the site. It's a little piece of history, and it represents a lot of hours of photo naming/resizing work. Some of the photos are cross linked from the Trip reports, which are also nice to keep. In general the old photo collections, while no longer relevant to the current canoe club, could still be attracting some interest, incoming links, and google kudos, from all over the web, in ways we might not expect. However there maybe one or two collections which could be thinned down a little bit. Drop some of the less good photos perhaps.

Reorganise Photos - There are some photos which have been uploaded very big. We should resize these. It would be tidier to have consistent photo sizing throughout, and large photos are not as quick to flick through. Suggested limit: The max dimension no bigger than about 500px, with exceptions made for particularly good photos. Note with most kayaking photo you want to crop to achieve a more hardcore 'zoomed in' look. Including surrounding rapid vs zooming in on the action, is always a tricky judgement call. Crop first, then resize. Always keep a copy of the original photo file. We could also perhaps look at reducing compression quality to 70% (perfectly adequate) on all the photos.

Delete some other information - In general this is a waste of time. Text/HTML/php content uses bugger all disk space so it's not worth even worrying about. However there is some clutter which we need to tidy up. It will help the disk space a little bit, but more importantly it will help the sanity of anyone looking at the files. We have whole experimental installations of software and old HTML redirect pages which are probably no longer needed. Need to check what's necessary and what isn't (a job for the Digimeister)