Summersault Blog

As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

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When Summersault first started out, one of our goals was to try to help not-for-profit organizations take advantage of the technologies of the Internet when they might not otherwise be able to do so. Of course, we were thinking about all of the cool things we could do for them on their sites to help level the playing field and get their image and message out to the wider world…we weren’t always thinking about the fact that this goal doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a good business model for a tech startup. Many of the groups we wanted to help didn’t have the budget for even the simplest web presence, and on the other hand, there were a good number of non-profits out there with plenty of funds but with technical problems we had no interest in working on solving.
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I’d like to expand on one of the points in Tim Berners-Lee excellent recommendations on designing a good URL. He suggests leaving access out of the URL. An example of that would be the inclusion of “Public” in this bug tracking URL.

Tim is concerned about this primarily because URL access changes over time, causing the URL to need to change when the resource hasn’t changed.

There’s a bigger problem with putting access in URLs. In the era of web2.0, more sites are data-driven, providing different views of the same resource depending on how you access it. Commonly, an administrator may see links to edit and modify the data, while the public has fewer or no options to alter the content.

The problem comes when people try to share URLs to resource between different access groups. Instead of displaying the resource, the user may be prompted to login, since they are a different group than the one needed to view the resource. That’s somewhat silly– why block me from accessing a resource that I can see, even if it’s a bit different than what the sender sees?

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