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In-Depth Information
III
Suddenly, downstream a few hundred yards, they saw a bear—who, unfortunately, saw them too.
The bear got down on all fours and started running toward them.
One of the hikers quickly reached in his backpack and started putting on running shoes. The sec-
ond hiker, despite the danger, laughed. “Even if you put on running shoes, you're not going to
outrun a bear.”
“I don't have to outrun a bear,” the first hiker answered, tying his laces. “I just have to outrun
you.”
Your blog doesn't have to outrun the bear—all the big beasts of the Web, such as newspaper or
television websites, which have huge budgets, design, and usability experts on staff, and the
wherewithal to source or generate, get permissions for, host, and stream oodles of media.
Battle of Media Types on WordPress
WordPress is great for hosting text, as you might expect, but also for hosting images. You can
always come up with some kind of complaint about almost anything, but WordPress really does a
marvelous job of hosting images and making it easy to put them in your blog posting.
However, if you upload media to a WordPress.com blog, you might notice something: Most media
file types aren't initially supported. You can upload the major types of graphics files and some
office-document file types, such as Microsoft Word and PDF documents. (These appear in your
blog as links to downloadable files, which is boring, but sometimes necessary.) However, there's
no ability to upload audio or video files in free WordPress.com blogs, only images and office
documents.
To upload audio files, you have to purchase some kind of space upgrade—even if you don't really
need the extra space. The lowest-cost upgrade is 5GB for $20 per year. This isn't a bad price for
the amount of space you get, but it's almost prohibitive if all you wanted to do was add an occa-
sional audio file to your blog. (After you add a space upgrade, you can then upload audio file
types, such as MP3 and WAV, from the media uploader.)
Video hosting is even worse for the casual media user on WordPress.com. To upload video, you
need to add a whole separate video upgrade, called VideoPress (like WordPress, get it?), for $60
per year. In a world in which YouTube will upload, compress, store, and stream your video for free,
VideoPress is definitely not the low-cost solution.
In this chapter, we only address images, the only media option you can pursue on WordPress.com
without an upgrade. (Though linking to a YouTube video works well and is free; see Chapter 10,
“Adding Upgrades, Audio, and Video.”) For options that you can pursue with an upgrade (or with a
WordPress.org-based blog), see Chapter 10. If you are a WordPress.org user, you can, of course,
host your own audio and video files and stream them to your blog, assuming your hosting provider
supports it.
Chapter 11, “Installing and Upgrading WordPress Software,” discusses the costs involved with
hosting a WordPress.org-supported blog. If you're a WordPress.com user trying to figure out what
to do, when you find out what many hosting providers charge for media hosting and streaming
downloads, a 5GB space upgrade or a VideoPress upgrade added to a WordPress.com account
might start to look pretty good!
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