Most readers will be pleased to learn that I believe I have now finally resolved the distribution method for the Summer of NHibernate screencast video series content.  To make the content more accessible and better organized, I have moved it to its own domain at http://www.SummerOfNhibernate.com.

This will allow me to provide single links to each screencast session in its entirety instead of having to use multi-part ZIP files to divide each session into small enough pieces that my previous content-hosting choices could accommodate them and this should make it much simpler and less painful for everyone to download the content.

There is a downside, however…

Sadly, there is no such thing as a free lunch so while I have gone to reasonable lengths to make this content more easily accessible to everyone, this was achieved by abandoning once and for all one of my core constraints in looking for ways to distribute this content: previously, my solutions needed to be free.  Under this new approach, I am now paying for the monthly hosting space and bandwidth myself out of my own pocket.

I am very interested in making the content available for the community but there are some practical limits to what I can afford on my own to fund this effort.  To help address these costs, I am providing a PayPal-enabled ‘donate’ button on my blog as well as on the SummerOfNHibernate.com homepage that can be used to make a donation to help cover my hosting and bandwidth costs.  You can read more about it here: Summer of NHibernate.

Please Consider donating something

If you are someone who finds the Summer Of NHibernate content to be of value, then I would urge you to consider making even a small donation to help defray my costs in this ($1, $5, $10?) — the distribution costs are a very real expense to me and anything that anyone can do to help mitigate those costs would be very much appreciated and help to improve the viability of what I’m trying to do here.

Thus far, the download rates for the first three sessions of the series (even with the annoyances of downloading multi-part ZIP files) have been very encouraging — well over 150 individuals downloaded each of the sessions and this speaks to a high level of interest in the community for this content.  If even a small percentage of these people would consider making a donation, it would go a long way to making this endeavor more economically feasible for me.

Otherwise, enjoy the easier access to the content and look for the next installment to be posted before the weekend is out.