Friday, June 27, 2008

Easily transfering and/or making large files accessible to yourself or others

On occasion, I've been blocked from sending Powerpoint presentations via email because they've been too large (file size) for either my email system or the recipient's email system to accommodate. I've had to chop them up into smaller pieces. I've just experimented with a free website that allows anyone to easily upload a file as large as 100MB for a specified period of time and receive a URL that can be distributed/emailed to others so that they can visit the site and download the file within the specified period of time (1 to 90 days). Files so uploaded can also be password protected. To check it out, click on the link below to download a 2.9 MB file of a book that I uploaded. The password is "test" and the file will be there for 15 days from today!

http://wikisend.com/download/470158/MerchantsOfDeception.pdf

To try uploading something, click on the "upload" tab at the screen you reached when you clicked on the above link.

This could also come in handy when you're at a conference and just realized you left your flash drive/cdrom/computer/handout with all of your presentation files back in the hotel or in your office or in my case at the most recent CATESOL, brought along the working files of some video presentations and not the final correctly formatted versions. If you upload anything related to the conference to the wikisend website before you go and email all of the URLs to yourself, you'll be able to retrieve them from any computer at the conference.

Finally, instead of passing out multi-page paper handouts (expensive to produce and heavy to carry through airports), you could pass out a one page version at the session that includes the URL and direct participants to download the full version when they return to their school sites.

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