Firefox Universal Uploader
These last few weeks I have been hidden away working on a couple of projects that are really taking off. One of these projects involves the use of video as the main medium, and as a result I have had to do a crash course on everything video related. There are many challenges when working with video, and then to have it placed online in a format that is accessible to most of the online population just compounds the amount of work that needs to be done.
Part of my new project, involves having my video flash files stored on a specialised video server, where you can just keep raw files such as AVI, MOV, MPEG4, MGEG2, FLV and the likes. Why do I want these files on a separate server? Well, reliability comes to mind first, and then the fact is when you have sizable amounts of traffic, you will need a server that is robust enough not to crash when hundreds or thousands of visitors come your way. There is also video quality that needs to be considered too, as YouTube just doesn’t cut it when it comes to professional looking and high quality video. Of course, price is a big concern too, as big video files will cost you a tonne in hosting fees if you go through your ordinary hosting panel.
Enter services such as Amazon S3 or the one I use, The Rackspace Cloud, and for about 15 cents per Gigabyte of data in/out, it is the perfect solution that takes care of all the above issues. The challenge of using one of these services is that they are a little different to conventional data management, and instead of having folders and directories, you now have such things as clouds and buckets. WTF?? It can actually be very off putting especially if you are not that technical minded and do not have time to learn a new language.
Enter the FireFox Universal Uploader, or FireUploader as it is also known. This is a great Firefox Addon that will work in a similar way to FireFTP, and if you are familiar with that then this will be a walk in the park. This uploader just doesn’t work for Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud, it also is compatible with the following:
- YouTube
- Picasa
- Flickr
- Google Docs
- Slideshare
FireUploader Features
Some more of the FireUploader features include:
- Upload files to multiple websites using a single user friendly interface.
- Upload any number of files at a time
- View the file upload progress – Ability to add multiple accounts and upload files to each account independently.
- Many site specific features allows you to edit the properties/meta data of the uploaded files with few clicks.
The FireUploader Addon for Firefox is shaping up to be one of my favourites, and the multitude of applications that you can use it for will make anyone’s life a little easier.
