kilted-scot-media

Transient media drop for kilted.scot social publishing. Disposable by design. Nothing here is an archive, and nothing here is canonical.

Why this exists

Instagram’s Content Publishing API does not accept a file upload. It takes a URL and fetches it: “We cURL media used in publishing attempts, so the media must be hosted on a publicly accessible server at the time of the attempt.” Unpublished containers expire after 24 hours.

So a finished video needs a public HTTPS URL that survives one fetch. This repo, served by GitHub Pages, is that URL. Once Instagram has the video, Instagram hosts it — the copy here has done its job.

What this repo is not

• Not the website. That is quietloom/kilted-scot-site, which deploys kilted.scot and is kept clean of transient files. Do not put site assets here or media files there.
• Not an archive. Master files live with each series’ own project. If the only copy of something is here, that is a mistake to fix, not a state to rely on.
• Not permanent. When this repo grows, it gets deleted and recreated. That is the intended lifecycle, not a failure. Every URL it has ever served is expected to break.

Lifecycle

1. Drop the finished video in, commit, push.
2. Wait, then verify. A push is not a live URL. Measured on this repo’s first deploy: two 404s before the file appeared, live at roughly 40–60 seconds. Confirm 200 with a video/* content type before handing the URL to any publishing tool — handing over a URL that is still 404ing wastes a container.
3. Publish. Instagram now holds its own copy.
4. Delete the file whenever convenient.
5. When the repo gets unwieldy, delete the whole thing and recreate it.

Removal is not immediate, and must not be treated as a privacy control. Measured 07/09/2026: a file deleted and pushed still returned 200 for at least 2.5 minutes afterwards — GitHub Pages serves through a CDN with its own cache lifetime. That is harmless for this repo’s purpose, but it means deleting a file does not promptly make it unreachable. Anything that must not be public must not be pushed here in the first place.

Licensing — read before adding anything

There is deliberately no LICENSE file, and one must not be added. Videos here may contain third-party assets under their own terms (CC BY-SA and similar), and a blanket repository licence would misstate the rights on someone else’s work.

Pushing a video here makes it publicly downloadable, which is a publishing event in its own right, not an implementation detail — see VISUAL-SOURCING-STANDARD.md in the kilted.scot project. Attribution obligations that apply to the published video apply to the copy here too. Check them before pushing, not after.