I’ve been looking for an easy way to add uploading to WhyYouShould for a while now. My main problem is that I built the site completely in ASP.NET, and without buying some expensive Control (or spending months writing it myself 
), it’s hard to do uploading with a progress bar. Also, it seemed next to impossible to get away from the ugly “Browse…” button.
I came across SWFUpload on Ajaxian today. The author has solved this problem (for all frameworks, not just ASP.NET) by combining the easy-of-use of Flash 8 for image uploading, with some tie-ins to Javascript. When you click your “browse” button (which can be skinned however you like), Javascript launches the file browser built into a hidden Flash file to select a file (or multiple files at once). Then, when you are ready, the hidden Flash file starts the upload and displays the upload progress. The file upload itself is done via a POST, so it will work for any web framework.
Pretty slick, eh! I know Jay is going to say, “Yah, Flash is awesome for file uploading. Didn’t you know that?”
Hmm…ever thought about just doing some kind of div that pops up with an animated gif saying “uploading”. Granted it doesn’t display the progress, but at least it is providing some kind of feedback to the user.
Something like this image ought to do the trick:
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/per/gr/gp/rel_interstitial_loading.gif
Lemme know what you think!