Composing your submissions as attachments

[Daddy-O]

I have had some experience with the use of forums but this reminds me as always that there is always something to learn.

Nice to meet you all. Thanks for the help.

[fenderjazz]

I hear what you're sayin' Brutus. I think in the long run downloading attachments will tax the server, especially if this place gets really busy. If 10 people all hit the board at the same time, reading a long thread, the load will likely be less than if half that many clicked and opened an attachment. Experiment, have fun, it's your place after all dude. We'll figure this mess out.

[Timmay!]

For what it's worth, and speaking as someone who has experience running a fairly large forum, the downloading of attachments definitely taxes the server more than just the downloading of a webpage with a lot of text on it. For one thing, as soon as you put text into a word document, for example, you incur a whole lot of size overhead due to all of the extra metadata that word adds to the document. Then when it's time to download the attachment, there are a lot of extra hits to the server involved to do that. Just text on a page (like this post, say) is actually extremely tiny to serve up when someone tries to hit the page. All of the graphics on this page for the buttons, the backgrounds, and all of that are going to eat a lot more bandwith than all of the text is.

If you have people host any images elsewhere, and use the [ img ] tags to put them in their posts, even a fairly long article on a recipe with pictures included won't tax the server as much as a bunch of attachments would, because all that's really being served up from the forum servers is a bunch of text, which is no big deal.

-Tim

[AFarCry]

(04-22-2010 10:10 AM)Brutus Wrote:  

(04-22-2010 09:35 AM)ForceTen Wrote:  A couple of issues with doing is that way:

1) Not everyone has MS Word so the .doc format isn't universal
2) Chance of spreading viruses
3) Scroll screen usually isn't an issue on lengthy submissions unless you're on a slow connection. It's when it's not broken down into paragraphs that makes it difficult to read.


All in all, I like it here and am curious to see how it grown. I'm not really much of a cook. But, I'm always willing to try something new.

Thanks for the response. I just assumed that MS Word was kind of everywhere but I'm learning it's not. What about PDF files? If anyone is having problems opening my attachments let me know and tell me another way to post them. Is there a way for me to convert my existing Word docs to PDF or perhaps a tiff file? Anything I can do to make it friendlier for the user?

Hi Brutus - If you are interested in an easy way to create pdf documents go to http://www.primopdf.com/index.aspx and download primopdf. To create a document, simply go to file, print, and select primopdf instead of your printer. Very easy to use.

[Brutus]

Thanks for the info. On the weekend (day off!) I'll check out the link. I have Adobe on my laptop. Can I use that program and select Adobe as my printer when converting word docs to pdfs?

[ForceTen]

If I'm not mistaken, there's an icon on one of the Word toolbars that will convert also. But, if you send to printer with Adobe selected, I believe that will work as well.