Hi Everyone,
I'm running Ning 3.0 and am a first time Ning user, so still learning the ropes a little bit. But I've run into a slight problem with something.
Basically, as part of our site we want to create a page where we (the admins/creators) can make available for download a library of files, mostly stuff like word documents, PDFs, pictures etc... Nothing too big. Ideally we wanted to just have a page where users can go and see thumbnails in rows across the screen (maybe 3 to 4 thumbnails per row) with a small text description on each thumbnail. Or something else that looks reasonably 'pretty'.
The problem is I can't find any way to share files like this on Ning 3.0, or any recent posts about this on the forums here. I thought loads of people would want something like this, but it seems not! I've looked into using something like box.net or dropbox, but it seems the applications for these are not compatible with 3.0, or just don't exist on the new platform? Or am I missing something here?
Any help or imformation would be very much appreciated. It is to be a critical function for our site and we can't really proceed without it.
Thanks for your time,
Kevin
Replies
Update: In case anyone else is having a similar problem ever, I found a bit of fix. It's not great but will certainly do the job temporarily.
It turns out you can actually embed a box.net folder into the HTML of one of your pages, so it comes up like it's part of your site when the page is loaded. And it doesn't look too bad either.
You can get the embed code for the box.net folder by going to the share button next to the folder on the box.net site.
both Issuu.com and scribd.com would work similarly by allowing you to embed either single documents or stacks of documents... this way you can easily track downloads.. if you need a tutorial for such let me know..
here is what it looks like in Issuu
I use ISSUU but it'll cost you $19.95/month and then you can only have 5 private files...if you want more files with a "private" status and not public they will charge extra.....the site works well............
Thanks J and Paul, yeah that Issuu looks pretty cool!
Hi Kevin, Have you considered uploading the files directly to your network? Doing so will produce a link to the download, you could then add and hyperlink images on a custom page. As the Network Creator, you could also add files directly to the site via the File Manager. Here's a Help Center article that might provide you with some more ideas.
The Box.net solution sounds pretty good, too. Cuts out a couple steps if your files are already hosted on Box.net at least.
Hi Allison,
Thanks for the reply. Yeah I actually did try uploading the files directly to the network like you say with the hyper linked images, and it works pretty good. The problem with that however was that the layout of the downloads (hyperlinked images) is not so good, they are all just stacked one on top of the other. You can see what I mean in the URL below, where I've uploaded some test documents etc...
http://redmutare.ning.com/resources
I suppose if there was some way to alter the layout of the hyperlinked images, that would solve everything. Like if it was possible to put a row of four or five hyperlinked images going horizontally across the screen, and then another row underneath etc... Or maybe there is already a way to do something like this?... I could be missing something here! :)
Thanks a million John, that solves my problem perfectly.
where did the page go? i wanted to check out your solution..
cool beans.. i don't want you to go to any trouble, just wanted to check it out.. thanks John
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