hDot Image and File Hosting

For several months, when I've been logging into Paypal, I've been getting a message that I have until January 2012 to agree to their new Electronic Communications Delivery Policy. I haven't actually read the policy yet, and I generally at least like to skim something before agreeing to it, and since I still have five months I kept clicking the "agree later" option.

The ad box in the upper right has been shrunk so it doesn't break the page on lower resolutions, a couple other ads have been moved around to maximize revenue, and some semi-working stylesheet things are now more-working. As always let me know if I broke something horribly.

I think that's mostly done. Everything's templated away and safe to use on multiple pages, all the image listings are updated (including most viewed today and all-time) with both the old tabular view and the new gallery view, file listings are only updated for the most downloaded pages (I'll probably get to the main file listing tomorrow). All of these pages are now (or will be, in the case of the master file list) under the same templates, so a lot of that weirdness as you went from pages styled ever-so-slightly differently should be gone soon.

So yeah look over there on the left side of hDot, all the old image tables have been replaced with somewhat shiny new thumbnails for easier at-a-glance browsing of new/popular files. The functionality is written such that I can call it with a single line of code for any size of table (the thumbnails are fixed at 160x120) so expect to see more of this around the site soon.

I'm not sure exactly what to do with the file listing, though.

File downloads have been changed, there's an added layer of security now and it sets up a future feature of allowing multiple files with the same name and/or multiple versions of the same file. All files should now "download" in the browser instead of displaying for certain filetypes (depending on your settings, i.e. mp3s will download now instead of loading in QuickTime if you have it installed).

The biggest change you'll notice is that anyone clicking on a file download link (the ones that look like /h/dl/###) from an external site now have a page pop up rather than just the download. This lets me show a few more ads (and offset the costs of downloads) so I'll be adjusting the bandwidth/credit system soon to account for this.

The update process may have disrupted some downloads between 2am-5am EDT today, but things are settled now.

Godaddy is moving all xerol.org sites to a new server in the next couple of days. There may be some brief downtime or broken items in this period. You may need to clear your DNS cache to get to the new server as well.

Today I'm implementing some of the long-planned features of hDot. First off you'll notice the vastly changed front page. This is the first step to allowing paid accounts.

The "my profile" block on the right now shows your daily bandwidth usage. All current accounts start with a 100MB daily quota, which goes up by 100KB every time someone views a page on the account. Hotlinked images and all file downloads will use up the quota. This is to bring more traffic into the site. Basically you'll have two options if you're a high-bandwidth user - Use hotlinked thumbnails to bring traffic in, or purchase additional quota.

The quota increase is permanent, and after a couple of weeks will be reduced to an amount based on your account level. Basically if you bring a lot of traffic into the site one time, you'll have a better bandwidth cushion for life.

Once all these features are implemented I'll be rolling out a paypal system for purchasing storage and bandwidth. Read on for an overview of available plans.

I wonder what could be inside?