While the catchy headline title here might lead you believe that our society is breaking down, it’s less severe than that and also less severe than the PHP upgrade that I wrote about last week: this article relates to public image links in Podio.
What are the Public Links?
Let’s start with a basic item with a picture of a great guy . .
The image is held in Podio and accessible to anyone with access to that record. In fact, here is the link to that image – https://files.podio.com/1712475455 and, unless you have Podio permissions, you cannot access it. EVER!
But that does not work out very well if I want to send you an email from Podio and have my face in the signature because (tip: if you did not know . .) usually images or GIFs are not truly IN the email but simply a link to where ever that image/gif is held.
So now you see the dilemma – how can Podio send an email with my face, company logo or any image – when you cannot access the link – EVER!!
This is where PWA came to the rescue. Like a knight on handsome steed or a super hero wearing a cape and underwear on the outside, the author of Podio Workflow Automation solved that problem by creating the . . . Public Link.
So glance back at the first image on this blog and notice the 2 empty Link fields I added. Well by using the flow:
I will populate them like this:
You will notice the 2 links:
And, you have probably guessed it, yes the latter one is THE PUBLIC LINK – here it is for you click:
https://files.workflow-automation.podio.com/flow-1413-3431303-60199-izzypodiophotocircle500pxheadshot.png
It is public and can used in emails and even websites like this one:
In fact many people do use PWA to feed content to their website using PWA and the content with in it meaning only once place to update:
Again you can see the Public Link in use again.
So CONGRATULATIONS!! Another educational lesson done and you are fast tracking towards becoming a Podio guru like us.
Now, let revisit the title of this blog again – The BIG Public Link Purge – and use the information you have learnt above to help explain what is happening.
Let’s say, in 2022 you used PWA to send out your customer Christmas card. It thanked them for the prosperous year, wished them a happy festive season and had a photo of your team all dressed as elves with the boss in a Santa suit from after the Christmas Party.
!!SEASONS GREETINGS!!
However, since then the team grown and you all look a little less like an oil painting done by DALL-E (image credit). You are never likely to use this image again but it will live in the PWA image store until the end of time.
Well not until the ‘end of time’ anymore. It will live there for 1 year then ‘poof’, come December 2023 the image URL will be gone from the store and thus from emails. However, if you do happen to use that image again the in Dec 2022 Christmas email then it issue a new Public Link and that will live there for 1 year then ‘poof’, come December 2024 it will be also be gone – you get my drift.
So how does this affect you . . .
Well, for any PWA flows that reissue the image Public URL then nothing. Take my email signature above – I use this flow every day thus that public link will keep refreshing. Any emails that are 1 year old will show a ‘missing picture’ image rather than the photo but all emails under 1 year old will be fine.
However, the CMS data feed above might have a problem. For, the eagle eyed of you, may have noticed that in that CMS feed I used the text field called ‘Public Link’ from the item in Podio.
and this will not refresh as this was just a string made for this presentation – it does not change. This would work though . . .
Which is telling PWA to regenerate the Image (Public URL) thus refreshing it for another year.
What do you need to do??
You (or a Podio Partner you trust) needs to review ALL your flows looking for places where images Public Links are being used and setup a plan with you for refreshing them once each year. We have built a handy tool that finds these items and allows us to quickly resolve your issue. Feel free to contact us to get this underway or simply book in a chat if you feel you need to learn more:
https://futuresolutionsonline.co.uk/book/