Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3 for short) is really hot lately. From the site:
“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”For the service Amazon charges a small fee: $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. Interested yet? I thought so.
The first major use of this service that I noticed was when Adrian Holovaty converted his chicagocrime.org site to serve its images via S3. Adrian estimates that this change, which greatly reduced the load on his server, will cost him about 35¢ per month.
The next item I noticed is an important building block for and S3-powered application: a snippet of code that sets a MIME type on S3 when uploading.
Finally, we have a very impressive undertaking—S3AjaxWiki. Sure, this sounds like a lame attempt at exploiting all of the latest Web 2.0 buzzwords, but it’s the real deal: “both the documents and the authoring application are all resident on the S3 servers, loaded and run on the fly in a browser”. More info here and here. This all started out with some work on S3 JavaScript Bindings, and Les Orchard just went hog wild and turned S3 into a Wiki.
I have been seriously neglecting the meta tags in my Movable Type blogs. In fact, other than the requisite content type declaration, I haven’t been using meta tags at all. That change today when I finally added entry excerpts into the meta descriptions.
After the first test, I noticed that there was a slight problem. If the excerpt contained quotes, they were not escaped in any way and invalidated the page. Brad Choate’s MT Regex plugin saves the day again:
<MTAddRegex name="dequote">s|"|'|g</MTAddRegex>
<meta name="description" content="<$MTEntryExcerpt regex="dequote"$>" />
