Alternative to uploading text file?

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  danielmeyer · Member · Jul 7, 2008 at 1:02 pm

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  Hi! I maintain a technical blog, and sometimes a post will involve a big stack trace (today’s is over 650 lines long).

  To avoid cluttering the main post, I was going to upload the trace as a text file and link to it, but it looks like .txt files are not a supported uploadable file type.

  I have considered converting the text file to

  • an image: but then viewers lose ability to copy/paste snippets
  • PDF: feels kind of heavyweight though and more work for me

  I could make a separate post of the stack trace, but that’s kind of ugly too since it would show up in the recent postings and it’s not really a top-level article.

  Is there a better way I should be dealing with large text files that I want to link to from my main post?
  -Daniel-

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  panaghiotisadam · Member · Jul 7, 2008 at 2:22 pm

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  FAQ says you can upload doc files – won’t that do?
  You can also upload files in an independent host (I use FileDen).

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  danielmeyer · Member · Jul 7, 2008 at 2:24 pm

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  I found this post: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27060
  It would be nice if WordPress.com supported uploading text files… is there a reason it now doesn’t or was this perhaps an oversight?

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  danielmeyer · Member · Jul 7, 2008 at 2:25 pm

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  panaghiotisadam – thanks for the reply! I’d rather not make it a Word doc, because then people have to load Word or OpenOffice just to view a simple text file.

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  danielmeyer · Member · Jul 7, 2008 at 2:37 pm

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  On the independent host idea, thanks for the FileDen pointer. I’d like to keep it all on wordpress.com if I can, though. I understand that wordpress can’t support all filetypes, but .txt files seem like an extra simple kind. Is there a security risk I don’t know about (.doc files would seem riskier) ? Or perhaps there’s only a few of us who want to upload text files and don’t want to do it as a Word doc ? :)

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  panaghiotisadam · Member · Jul 7, 2008 at 3:13 pm

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  @danielmeyer: I don’t know enough to answer your last questions! As for the thread you suggested above, I couldn’t make much sense of it so I tried things myself. The uploader won’t accept unsupported file dormats, with or without their proper suffix. You can fool it by using a false suffix: I successfully uploaded a plain text file after adding “.doc” to it. In that case, however, when your readers click on the link their browser will think it’s a Word file, so you’ll have to tell them it isn’t – not an elegant solution, I think.