5tags

Amazon offers a great service that allows you to host your files on their servers for a small charge called Simple Storage Service or S3 for short. The fee schedule is as follows:

• Storage

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

• $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
• $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

If you are strapped for bandwidth, want to speed up your site or want to handle the digg effect like a champ then S3 is for you. It is extremely affordable and their is no minimum fee so you can easily try it out for a period of time and you bill could be as low as a few cents.The problem is that if you want to use the S3 service for hosting files to be served on your website, they give you a hideous URL. This tutorial will show you how to use a sub domain from your own domain to point to your S3 bucket. In short this tutorial takes this

https://s3.amazonaws.com/5tags/conf_room.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=1MAQQAHYZFCDAD01MG02&Expires=1184870730&
Signature=CZnuUaqrqHzvAS9sgDFAEFdse1zw%3D        

to this

http://assets.5tags.com/file.jpg        

What You Need

• Amazon S3 account
• Firefox - S3Fox plugin

Where to Begin

You will first have to go to S3browse.com to create a new bucket. You can either do a temporary sign in or register at the site. S3Browse is a web based front end that makes uploading and bucket management significantly easier. To sign in you must have your access key id and your secret access key which can be found at Amazon’s Web Services section, under AWS Access Identifiers.Once signed into S3Browse you will be presented with your list of buckets.

What To Do

• Create a new buckets with the exact same name as your subdomain. In my case “assets.5tags.com”
• You should have the S3Fox plugin installed. Open S3Fox from the tools menu. Your bucket list should appear.
• Click the bucket (folder) that you just created once.
• Click the “pencil on paper” icon directly above to edit the permissions
• Make sure that read is enabled for everybody. This makes the urls shorter and easier.
• While in S3Fox, upload a test file into the bucket

In short we just created a new bucket, and allowed anybody to access it via the web. S3 defaults so that URLS are generated on the fly that include expiry dates, and the unique id. This is so that the rightful owner of the file can generate URLs to give to colleagues that have expiry dates, and random people can’t browse their files.

Setting Up the DNS

This is where all of the fun begins if you don’t have a host that supports easy DNS modifications. If you have a host like Dreamhost or Media Temple then it is very simple. There are 1000s of hosts our there and the procedure is generally the exact same. For today I will show how to do it on Media Temple’s grid server as well as Dreamhost.In short you want to create a CNAME record that maps a nickname (your subdomain) to “s3.amazonaws.com.”.

Media Temple - Grid Server

• Go to the domain where you want to create the sub domain in the Media Temple Account Center
• Go to “Edit Zone” and click “+ Add a Record”
• For “Name” type the full sub domain you want to use. In my case “assets.5tags.com”
• Make the “Type” “CNAME”
• Under “Data” type “s3.amazonaws.com.” make sure you include the trailing period.
• Save the settings and YOU ARE DONE!

Dreamhost

In The End

By using Amazon’s S3 for you files on our website you can not only save expensive bandwidth from your web host but you can also make your website load a lot faster. The high majority of the load time of a web page is the images. By serving them from S3 you can count on fast, reliable, service. By having the images under you own sub domain you not only appear more professional but trick people into thinking the files are coming off your own server, which can have several benefits. If you are on a cheap web host and don’t want to take the risk of paying large bandwidth overage bills then S3 is great for you!

I recently installed K2 because I was getting very sick and tired of my old theme. I have used K2 before, and went all out with the AJAX that is included in the package. I simply took out all of the javascript includes for the live searching, live commenting, and rolling archives, and these simple tasks made the main page load about 300% faster. I then took out all of the icons, and optimized some recent blog post images and got the total size of the main page to 610 Kb. These new tweaks make it well over 400% faster than the original k2 theme.I like to measure the speed with websiteoptimization.com’s tool.To set a benchmark I like to check the load time on a 14.4K connection. It originally took 250 seconds and now it takes 63 seconds for the main page and 30 seconds for the ‘archives” page to load.All in all I am very, very happy with the results and I believe that I can cut it down even more. A few other factors affected these results such as wp-cache, and the new server setup. Once I get everything down even more I will be sure to share all of my results, tips, and tricks.

I am currently making a brand new theme based on K2. K2 is a very solid theme and makes it very easy to create a design around it. I have been very busy with my new company and am only working on it in my off time which is usually 2-3AM. Look for it in the next couple of weeks. I may do slow changes so that you can see the progress as I work on it.

Over 8000 people have committed to 122,000 green lifestyle choices, with their friends. That’s 204,000 Leaves grown. All in just a few weeks, and only organically with zero press or blog coverage.

See “I Am Green”?

“I Am Green”? is a networking application for facebook members about caring for the future of our planet by changing little things we do everyday. Members change small things about their every day lives, and share these ideas together. Some of the popular actions are using cold water instead of hot, switching to the right green products, and not using paper or plastic in many specific cases where habit draws us but it’s not needed. Members call their green actions ‘Leaves’ which they pile up. Their lists are displayed on their profile for all their friends to see and endorse or even copy. Its a smart way to find out about little things that will make a better tomorrow.’

Try “I Am Green”?

The facebook platform makes rich, social interaction possible. If you are Green, act on it, and be proud of it.

The current theme is about 90% complete. Over the past two days I have been browsing the website from different browsers and devices and have noticed a few things that are not working correctly. These include:

• Link Styles in posts are incorrect
• Random hovers appear due to incorrect CSS

I still have to go through each post and change the images to fit but all in all the new style is working well with the content. Right now I am working on a mobile version of the website that is make especially for the Nintendo DS web browser. If I have some time to make the plugin “good”, I will release it for the public, again.

For the next 1 to 2 months I will be stuck on a Windows PC. During this period of time I will still have to design websites and learn Ruby. Writing code is one of the most simple tasks you can do on a computer but any programmer will tell you that notepad just doesn’t cut it. On OSX there is a great application that you can buy for around $60 called Textmate. Textmate speeds up development because it auto completes what you type. For instance you can set the DOCTYPE with only a few key strokes.

There really isn’t been a solid code editor for Windows, until now! A small firm has just released the alpha version of InType. InType is a new lightweight, fast, and beautiful text editor. After playing with it for several hours it is very evident that it is not complete but you can see the developers have the correct ideas.

Cons:

• not tabbed
• can not undo
• several mistakes in the bundles of code
• no ftp/internet integration (yet)

Benifits:

• easy language changing
• great styles
• wide variety of bundles
• lightweight & quick

I suggest that you check this out if you are stuck on Windows or don’t want to shell out $60 for TextMate. It still has a long ways to go to be considered a TextMate replacement or equivalent but it is sure a step in the right direction for Windows text editors.