Space Get – a small change

The three or four of you who follow Space Get may have noticed a little change in the weblog description: it now just says “Spaceflight video sticky-ball,” omitting mention of “images and other media.” The reason: easy embed fields on YouTube and Google Video.

When I want to post an image (usually NASA public domain photos), the process goes like this: save image locally, upload to Blogger, decide on a size and alignment, tweak Blogger’s auto-generated image tag, give title, publish. When it comes to video, however, it’s a simpler matter involving no file transfer: copy URL to Link field, copy embed code to body, give title, publish. A step or two shorter, no messy save/open dialog boxes, much time saved.

It seems ironic that still images should be harder to post than moving videos, but the YouTube model of offering open embedding really clinches it, making videos much faster to post than photos — and if posting to Space Get weren’t a fast affair it wouldn’t be tenable for me. Plus, I don’t need to worry about storage or bandwidth limits. Perhaps if I could implement an imgred-like solution, or if someone on Flickr had a huge cache of current and historical iconic spaceflight imagery, I might do photos more often, but as it is, Space Get is more about videos now.

Also, video is way more awesome. It’s moving pictures!

(As a concession, I’ve added a feed links box to the Space Get sidebar, grabbing links from my del.icio.us space tag. Those links will often contain imagery.)