Getting web video working on our Squarespace site - Part 1.

A couple of weeks ago we moved our Philadelphia wedding videography site, to Squarespace a managed hosting and content management system company. While Squarespace has a lot of advantages, it doesn't provide much support for a video intensive site like Bonnie Blink Productions. They have a 20mb upload limit which effectively prevents us from putting any video over a couple of minutes directly on Squarespace. To work around this I employed two methods. One was to upload our shorter videos (under 10 minutes) to ExposureRoom. ExposureRoom is a site optimized for content creators. The quality of their Flash video is quite good and they transcode each video in three sizes (small, medium, and HD). Code for embedding video on your site is provided as well as thumbnails.

There was still the problem of the longer videos (up to 40 minutes). I would need to put them somewhere. Fortunately I still had my account at Dreamhost where the Bonnie Blink Productions website has been for the past six years. Since they have almost unlimited storage and high bandwidth limits, there would no issue with storing and streaming the content from there. Since the www.bonnie-blink.com domain had be pointed to Squarespace, I couldn't reference any content still at Dreamhost. We also own www.bonnieblink.com and www.bonnieblinkproductions.com. These have always redirected to www.bonnie-blink.com. What I did was to make www.bonnieblinkproductions.com a fully hosted domain. Now all the longer videos will be at that URL.

The next step was to set the video up on the Squarespace site. More on that in the next installment.