Yearly Archives: 2011

Host Static Websites With Amazon S3

Amazon S3, the inexpensive storage service, now can be used to host entire static websites. Though the service will accept any kind of file, which makes it great for keeping large or frequently-accessed data (podcasts, software downloads, JavaScript widgets, etc.) off your server, until recently it didn’t support index files. You could point a domain to an S3 bucket and upload HTML files, but visitors would get an automatically-generated listing of files instead of your index.html content. That has now changed. Amazon now allows you to setup custom root and error documents.

To get started, open the Amazon S3 Management Console, and follow these simple steps:

1) Right-click on your Amazon S3 bucket and open the Properties pane
2) Configure your root and error documents in the Website tab
3) Click Save

It seems like a good way to throw up a quick traffic-resistant website, though I imagine it could get expensive pretty quickly if it were, say, submitted to Reddit.

BlogBuzz February 19, 2011

Are You Using Flattr?

I’ve been keeping an eye on an interesting service called Flattr for awhile now. It’s a “social micropayments” service that had been in private beta for awhile, but is now open to anybody who wants to join. Flattr’s premise is that you, as a…

PHP Error Suppression Symbol

Have you ever seen a PHP script where a line is prefaced with a “@” symbol? Ever wonder what it was for? The at symbol in PHP is the error suppression operator. Any expression with you use it with will never throw an error,…

Mobile Last.fm Usage Becoming a Subscriber Feature

Last.fm, the music streaming service that uses social tagging to find custom-tailored tunes, will be requiring that users of the iOS/Android/etc. apps pay $3/month for a premium subscription. I have found it convenient to listen to Last.fm on my iPod on more than one…

BlogBuzz February 12, 2011

Little Big Details: A Blog of UI Details

Michael, the guy behind Pro Blog Design and PliablePress, posted a link recently posted a link to a neat design blog recently. Known as “Little Big Details,” it features minor design elements that are exceptionally functional and possibly worth emulating. I like the concept,…

CodeIgniter 2.0 Released: No More PHP4 Support!

EllisLab just released version 2.0.0 of the CodeIgniter PHP framework. There are a few interesting new additions, such as a cache driver with APC and memcache support, the option to let controller handle 404 errors, and the deprecation and removal of Scaffolding. Perhaps the…

BlogBuzz February 5, 2011

Metered Internet Comes to Canada

The Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission approved Canada’s largest ISP, Bell Canada, to implement Usage Based Billing (metered internet). Instead of paying a flat rate for all-you-can-eat internet service, or around 200GB of monthly transfer, you pay $31.95 for 25GB worth of internet usage, and at…