Hi Brynn,
Most of what you say is right.
Well, something still feels weird about this kind of routine.
It's perfectly normal for the internet. It's just like putting links into a spreadsheet instead of a text document. We have more flexibility with the spreadsheet as it's DATA, rather than text, which must be reformatted manually every time.
I assume it takes more resources - bandwidth, space, cpu or other?
To host our own? Yeah, it's 300 times more pressure than a text file and 20 times more pressure than a large image.
We'd need a server FARM, rather than a single machine. So since we can embed and link to youtube we do that. Wven my own videos will be on youtube and I'll be generally deleting any large videos that might be uploaded by other people since as an administrator I draw the line as hosting video directly.
Of course there may be future exceptions, but I feel this is a fairly good baseline rule.
to do it using the gallery, than just a simple text link. I guess I'm just old fashioned. I'd rather see nicely organized text, lists or table, where potentially hundreds of tutorials can be linked on one page.
That's the elegance of DATA, we can turn the links into a list and design a page for the content that's disconnected from the actual content. So management of which videos becomes a parallel job that ANYONE can do, and page design becomes something that web designers do in code.
The DATA can also be indexed, so text searches and drill down categorisation become possible. Overall it's much better to have this sort of thing in a SYSTEM, than to have it in a manually curated text file.
Or is it never in the plans? I think it would make the website even better.
In this case, there's no clear benefit to hosting our own. Only costs and burdens to us. Youtube (and others) so a fine job allowing embedding and handle many hairy issues for us.
Our job is to integrate well enough to make it worthwhile for people to list their tutorials on the website. I'm hoping the new link function will make that easier.
Best Regards, Martin Owens