Were a book publishing company and I have some 40mb of “wallpaper” [and more coming with future titles] that we would like to offer on our web site built with Sparkle. It seems you can only embed a downloadable item. 40mb is a lot really. Having it on my ftp site where I am hosted would be great and would allow my web site to be kept small and fast to upload changes/updates. I can do this now, but the upload time will be quite long. We update the site a lot.
If I am understanding this correctly, you want to have the website part separate and some downloads separate.
For this, I think you should be able to store the file(s) in a folder on your server and just use the FTP/ HTTP link(s) on the website (attached screenshot). With that, your website file will be small enough, and your downloads would reside in a separate folder that you can modify at will.
there is no big difference in bandwidth usage by offering the file for download over http (from your website) or ftp
while ftp is probably going nowhere, it is in general an older and more fragile protocol, so I’d go with http any day
Sparkle does not re-publish files when changing the site, if the file is unchanged; if re-publishing does in fact happen we regard it as a bug and would like to investigate and fix it (emailing feedback@sparkleapp.com is best for that)
as @phoenix1386 mentions, you can set up an external link, the way you would set that up with http is to use a third party FTP client such as Cyberduck or FileZilla, upload the wallpapers to their own folder (so that they don’t conflict with Sparkle’s folder name choices, say “wallpapers”), then figure out the link to those files (http://yourdomain.com/wallpapers/wp1.zip for example) and enter that link in Sparkle
Hope this makes sense, feel free to ask for any clarification.