Publishing lots of audio files

September 14, 2005 12:58 PM

I'm looking for guidelines on publishing a lot of audio files on a web site using Movable Type.

I have a client that has a news and sports site with daily postings of mp3, asf, and wma files. They'd like to use Movable Type to manage the site's content at an ISP and store the audio files on their own server. I'm planning on using BigPAPI to modify Movable Type's interface so it creates new weblog entries on the ISP and FTPs the audio file to the client's server.

Are there any problems with this approach? Is there a better way to do it?

posted by kirkaracha to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I don't forsee any problems with that approach but if the bulk of the content is on their servers anyway (and the most bandwith) why not just set it up completely on their server? Just curious. If set up correctly it would need little to no maitenance besides possibly a restart every once and a while.
posted by meta87 at 1:57 PM on September 14, 2005

Response by poster: They want an ISP because they don't want to do the day-to-day management of the web sites, and they want to keep the media files on their server because they don't have the budget for the disk space and bandwidth on an ISP. Also, they've got a Windows server, and the process of setting up Movable Type on Windows is a little much for them.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:21 PM on September 14, 2005

Oh thats fine, I assumed that you were the one that would set something like that up. Also, you might want to try looking around, there are some good web hosting deals with alot of space.

I use mediatemple.net and haven't had any problems.

They have two new plans, one for 8 bucks a month with 2 gigs of space and one for 15 bucks a month with 5 gigs of space.
posted by meta87 at 2:53 PM on September 14, 2005

Make sure to modify the value of CGIMaxUpload in mt-config.cgi to a higher value, because the default is much too small to allow for most media file uploads.
posted by evariste at 4:30 PM on September 14, 2005

Also, to tell you the truth, you're over-engineering it if you're gonna use BigPAPI just to ftp a file to another server. So you're gonna use MT's upload file function, then use some homebrewed plugin to ftp it to the Windows box? Isn't there a bit of a pointless step here? Just ftp directly to the Windows machine, and link to it from the MT blog. Simplicity is best.
posted by evariste at 4:34 PM on September 14, 2005

Response by poster: They're not very technical, so using an FTP client would be difficult for some of them. Also, they want a replacement for their current custom-developed system that involves filling in a form and selecting a file to upload, so I need to provide a solution with fewer steps, not more.

And I'll probably do some Ajax/PHP stuff in a popup window, just access it from the MT interface.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:41 PM on September 15, 2005