Linking to sources and uploading material

The ethos of these forums is to present and discuss detailed information about how we build an independent Wales. This means that our discussions need hard information, with enough detail to make your particular point.

You are especially encouraged to provide links to sources of information. Often these will be available on the web, and on this forum you can link to them as easily as by cutting and pasting the link address (URL) into your post.

Sometimes you might wish to quote from sources which are not on the web. Although you can refer to a book, paper or journal in the usual way, not everyone will have access to a library. So in order to involve others as widely as possible, you might like to consider the following.

You can copy information from a document into your post. If that results in a post that is several thousand words long, it certainly doesn't matter in any technical sense. Of course you need to be aware of copyright restrictions but, in general, you can quote sections of other people's work for the purposes of review up to a chapter long. This could be scanned from the document concerned.

Also, if you want to make information available to view or download, rather than simply include it in your post, there are free sites which enable you to upload documents which anybody else can then see and download without having to use a password. Some of these restrict the types of files you can upload (very often it will be pictures and little else) and others will only hold unaccessed files for a limited period, but these are two sites that allow you to store a wide-range of file types, such as pdfs, spreadsheets and even media files.

www.fileden.com
www.sigmirror.com

The forum also allows you to include flash presentations and link to movies from YouTube and similar sites, as well as to show normal images and format your posts to make them easier to read. The explanation page is here:

BBCode

It's not possible (well it is, but it's not straightforward) to use YouTube or other video hosting sites for audio files. But there is an alternative, called Houndbite.

Once you've signed up and uploaded the file, you can click a button to get the code to embed in your post. Here is an example of what you'll get:

Code:

<object codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" align="middle" height="52" width="322"> <param name="allowscriptAccess" value="sameDomain"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.houndbite.com/player.swf"> <param name="quality" value="high"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"> <embed src="http://www.houndbite.com/player.swf" flashvars="filename=http://s3.amazonaws.com/houndbite/syniadau-upload-d98p1jfddbgo.mp3&autoplay=0&duration=126000" quality="high" bgcolor="#eeeeee" name="player" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="52" width="322"> <param name="FlashVars" value="filename=&autoplay=0&duration=126000"> </object>

and it will result in this:




Another option, if the audio file is already on the web (or if you upload it to a hotlinkable file storage site like Fileden), is to make a hybrid which combines the code for a publicly available player alongside the existing URL of the audio file. For example, you can use the player from Odeo.com to make this:

Code:

<embed src= "http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_black.swf" quality="high" width="300" height="52" allowscriptAccess="always" wmode="transparent"  type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars= "valid_sample_rate=true&external_url=http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/9/30/2122775/fflathuwpuw.mp3" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"> </embed>

and it will result in this:




You need to replace the URL, which in the example above is:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/9/30/2122775/fflathuwpuw.mp3

If you are a complete technophobe (or just lazy) you could simply post the URL of the file. But this is not recommended, because what happens when someone clicks the link is unpredictable. What happens on your computer will not necessarily be what will happen when other people do the same. It all depends on the browser and the way the browser preferences are set up. The file may download automatically and play in the browser, or it may open in a separate application, or a dialogue box may come up. But it will have to fully download before it can be played.

Finally, a word of warning. Don't be too clever with code. The purpose of posting anything on this forum is to provide information to support the point you want to make, not to attract attention. Any media file you include in a post must be controllable by the reader, so autoplay and looping must be turned off (set to "0" or "false") and there must be a pause or stop button.