Repository A.

Since Mastodon instances are often run as a free service, it seems only right not to overwork them by uploading huge videos (!!!! they need to store those, imagine if you had to store every video you watched it soon adds up...) and to a smaller degree, pictures and animated GIFs. 

I'm after a way I can put my images up on my local Mastodon instance (@prawntech3d@mastodon.online if you want to follow me) that doesn't depend on their database for storage. I have this blog, and it can host images for me in posts, so I'm giving it a try. The idea is a bit like CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) used by some sites. 

Places like Cloudflare, for example, host your content on their worldwide network of servers and you just put a CDN link into your web page, and that fetches the images/videos/documents from there. The result is that since your content is hosted on a network of servers there'll be one nearer to your reader than you are so the content will load faster, and as a bonus you don't need to store it on your server. 

What I'm doing here isn't exactly like a CDN because most messaging sites don't have a way for inline loading CDN content. Yet. So this is an experiment. I'll put photos and so forth here and see if I can link to them in messages (I know I can, but then the reader has to click the link to follow it) but also if there's a way to make them appear inline, i.e. just appear in the message itself like they do if I send them normally. 

EDIT: It seems I was right to choose this option, because the large influx of new users may have overloaded the database of the file server section of the instance. For now, let's enjoy the fact that I can still make my images available to my messaging contacts.

Repo Begins:

Random test image off my camera, a two panel panorama of the ocean between Wonthaggi and Inverloch taken one late afternoon recently.

if Ye know of a ting called "Little Britain" Ye will LOL.

I found this scribbled note outside Twitter HQ, I swear!

Big sets in big families.

Grammar. Change my mind.

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