Evan is a 25 year old designer, programmer and college student from the cornfields of Illinois. Aside from being a freelance web developer, he is also an aspiring video game designer. Learn more.
Just a quick post to let folks know that I’ve pushed a major update to my SmugMug URL forwarding service SmugURL. It’s got a new web UI, a revised API and a lot of improvements behind the scenes. The rework I put into it allowed me to lay some framework for some future features I’ve been thinking about adding, namely social bookmarking, voting on links and optional hit tracking complete with fancy bars, graphics and other bells and whistles.
Earlier this evening Don MacAskilltwittered that SmugMug released it’s new Flash-based video player and I must say, it’s very slick indeed. Not many folks realize that SmugMug supports video, but it does a real bang up job of it. If you’re a Power or Pro account holder, you can upload videos up to 2.5 or 10 minutes in length respectively. They don’t cheat you on the quality, either; as long as it’s less than 512MB in size, they’ll take your video up to true HD resolution (1280×720) and encode it in H.264, which is quickly becoming the most popular video compression codec.
SmugMug won’t scale your video to an ugly resolution, or artifact the crap out of it to save space on their servers. It’s just your videos, in great quality, without the bullshit.
Alright, alright; all my sweet nothings about their service aside, I really like what the SmugMug did here. The interface is sleek an unobtrusive, it’s quick to load/buffer/whatever (not sure how that works in Flash exactly, especially since you’re loading an external video file) and… have I mentioned the quality? ;)
Below is a glimpse of their new Flash-based player in “web resolution” (425×240), which I only chose because of limitations in my own site’s design. Regardless, hit up this page to see it in all of it’s HD glory.
If you want to give SmugMug a try, there’s a free 14 day trial. I recently made the switch from Flickr, and I totally recommend it.
So, Jim convinced me to make the switch from Flickr to SmugMug last week; overall, I’ve been incredibly pleased with the service. I’ll go into the reasons I’m enjoying my time with SmugMug so much more than Flickr in a future post. That said, one aspect I didn’t like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can’t fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly.
So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL. It takes a obfuscated SmugMug URL (be it a gallery, or a direct link to a photo or video) and makes a pretty version suitable for sharing on your site or with friends.
They take you to the same place, one just gives some indication of what we can expect to find there. What makes this different from the multitude of other shortening services out there? Not much, really. However, I liked the idea of enforcing the SmugMug username in the URL so there is some indication of ownership at a glance.
Give it a try, and let me know if you encounter any problems. It’s very much a work in progress.
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