Category Archives: Web

When you create a new bucket in Amazon S3, you can choose from five different locations: US Standard, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.

Most web applications however have visitors from all around the world. So if you choose US Standard, visitors from the east coast will have a very low latency while visitors from Europe and Asia will have to wait longer for the resources stored on Amazon S3.

A common approach to this problem is using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN consists of many servers all around the world all holding copies of the resources of your web page. So a visitor from the US would get content from a server in the US, a visitor from Asia would receive the content from an asian server and a European from a server in Europe. This guarantees low latency and better bandwidth for visitors from all locations.

I’m using S3 for 3-6-5-days.com with a US Standard bucket. I wasn’t really happy with the latency, but luckily setting up a CDN for your S3 bucket is as easy as pie.

All you need to do is this (I will assume you’re already signed up for S3 and created a bucket):

1. Sign up for Amazon Cloud Front.
2. Click on Create Distribution and select the bucket which you want to distribute through Cloud Front CDN)
3. Now, specify whether you support http and https or only https. Only you can configure whether your resources should be available for streaming or downloading.
   
4. On the last screen, hit Create Distribution
5. You’re done! The distribution is configured now. Amazon will automatically start deploying the resources to the various edge locations, in the US, Asia and Europe.

There are two more things that need to be done outside of the Amazon AWS Management Console:

1. You need to create a subdomain and configure the CNAME you specified when creating the distribution. So for above example I would create a subdomain like this: cdn.3-6-5-days.com. The CNAME would point to the domain name you see in the Amazon AWS Management Console. It is something like 123xyz.cloudfront.net
2. Once subdomain and CNAME are configured you’re ready to use the CDN in your web application. Simply make sure that instead of loading resources from the bucket URL you use your new CDN URL. For above exmaple that would be cdn.3-6-5-days.com/path/to/resource/test.css

Here is another good article about the topic: How to Setup Amazon S3 with CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network

Since yesterday evening I can’t post any more on Twitter via Firefox. I’m using version 3.0.13. The problem is reported across various versions: Firefox 3.5 not playing nicely with Twitter
I hope that gets resolved soon. I don’t want to start up another browser just for a single application.

Der Service den Gravatar anbietet ist ebenso einfach wie nützlich: Einmal einen Avatar hochladen und diesen überall verwenden.

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

Verschiedene Dienste sind mit Gravatar integriert (Wordpress, Github), so dass man nichts weiter machen muss als sich bei Gravatar anmelden und den Avatar hochzuladen oder wenn anmelden und hochladen bereits geschehen sind: gar nichts. Einzige Voraussetzung ist, dass man sich mit der gleichen E-Mail-Adresse anmeldet wie bei Gravatar. Verwendet man mehrere E-Mail-Adressen, kann man diese seinem Account bei Gravatar hinzufügen.