WordCamp Chicago 2010 Followup

This past weekend I spent my time at WordCamp Chicago. It was an amazing weekend nonetheless and here’s a quick followup from my weekend. First, if you’re not familiar with WordCamps and are a user of WordPress, I highly suggest you go. Its a weekend full of WordPress users, developers, writers, and everything in between. These events reiterate how awesome the WordPress community really is!

Read more and find a WordCamp near you: http://central.wordcamp.org/

The night before, I attended a WordPress Chicago meetup and got the chance to meet a lot of great WordPress users and developers of the community.   If you’re in Chicago make sure to check out the meetup group:  http://www.meetup.com/mywplife/

(Happen to crash a ritzy lil party at Millennium Park with some new friends afterwords)

As for the conference itself, the quality of the content and the presenters was definitely worthwhile.  I was very impressed with the amount of great content I was able to take away.  There was two tracks, a developers and a users track, in which I found myself bouncing back and forth too.

There was a lot learned, so thank you to all of the presenters.  If you’d like to see the topics shared, check out the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/event/wordcamp-chicago-2010/slideshows

In short here’s a few bullet points from the weekend:

• WordPress 3.0 to be released June 14th
• New affiliate plugin for the WP-ECommerce plugin
• New event ticket plugin for same WP-ECommerce plugin
• SpriteMe.org – Great service to help sprite images on your site for performance
• The WordPress community is extremely friendly and simply awesome
• Widget Logic – Plugin to determine which widgets show on which pages
• Custom Post Types in WP 3.0 is my favorite new feature, WordPress is heading into the CMS direction, finally!
• Update Notifier – Plugin to notify you when plugins and themes need to be updated
• GoDaddy has WordPress designed hosting packages

Ultimately, though, these events are about connecting with people who are just as passionate about what you do.  This is my strong reason for going.  Think of them as events with speaker breaks.   And the after parties are where it’s at.  If you go to one of these events DO NOT MISS THE AFTER PARTY!   WordCamp Chicago had their after party at the Bull&Bear.  Again, the night was great, such a stellar group of individuals.

After chatting with a few new friends, we got on this sharing book spree, that it inspired me to put together a little internet book club.  Its invitation only, but feel free to email me for an invite code.  For now check out the great books we’re sharing here: http://www.pixelminute.com

Lastly, WordCamp Chicago couldn’t have ended any cooler.  I watched a very inspiring presentation of Cory Miller (at iThemes) and we all teamed up, raining GoDaddy stress balls on him.  I recorded a video of it with my phone but Qik is being stupid with me.  Luckily Mike Torbert was able to catch a shot of the mayhem:

UPDATE: My video of the Cory Miller ball rain finally uploaded, fast forward to about 3:55.

If you’re looking for something to do this fall, I’m helping with the organization of WordCamp Detroit this October. Register now at: http://www.wordcampdetroit.com

WordPress fans unite.

Thanks to everyone in Chicago for making it an amazing experience, see you next year!

An Epic WordPress Resource Roundup – Videos, Tools, Guides, Podcasts, Sites, Events and more

One of the great things that makes WordPress so easy to use is the vast number of resources available.  If you’re just getting started or are a 5-year veteran, you’ll never run out of great resources available to help you further excel your WordPress skills.  In this post I want to share some of my WordPress resources that has and continues to enhance my WordPress experience.

WordPress Specific Sites

The following sites below are dedicated to providing you quality WordPress content…

• WPBeginner.com – If you’re just getting into WordPress, this is a great site that shows you a simple step-by-step approach to getting WordPress installed and setup.
• WordPress.tv – This is a great resource of videos all related to WordPress. If you want to learn how to use WordPress, plugins, or other unique tools with WordPress, watch these videos!
• WeblogToolsCollection.com – I love this blog for the weekly selected plugins and themes. You’ll quickly discover how fast WordPress continues to grow.
• WPCandy.com – Full of fun goodies, tips, guides, and updates relating to WordPress.
• WPDesigner.com – As a developer you’ll find great WordPress code snippets, tricks, and tools to enhance your WordPress development skills.
• WPTavern.com – Keep up to date with the newest stories and features being talked about around WordPress and the WordPress community. This site has an awesome corresponding podcast too (featured below).

• SmashingMagazine.com
• SixRevisions.com
• SmashingApps.com
• 1stWebDesigner.com
• Noupe.com
• WebDesignerWall.com

Roundup of WordPress Roundups

WordPress Books Worth Buying

• 
  WordPress Bible
  Price: USD 31.49
  
• 
  Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog (Smashing Magazine Book Series)
  Price: USD 29.69
  
• 
  WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
  Price: USD 34.40
  
• 
  WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide)
  Price: USD 34.37
  
• 
  WordPress for Business Bloggers: Promote and grow your WordPress blog with advanced plug-ins, analytics, advertising, and SEO
  Price: USD 34.48
  
• 
  ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
  Price: USD 16.49
  

WordPress Podcasts

If you don’t feel like reading, listen to these great podcasts as experts and developers share their expertise…

• WordPress Community Podcast
• WordPress Weekly

Awesome Lists of Free WordPress Themes

Overtime I’ve found some great lists of free WordPress Themes that I find myself going back to all the time when building a new WP site…

• 20 Best WordPress e-Commerce Themes
• 40 Stylish, Minimal and Clean WordPress Themes
• 29 Premium-Like Free But Extremely Tremendous Portfolio WordPress Themes
• 28 New Great Magazine/Newspaper Style WordPress Themes
• 100+ Free Beautiful WordPress Themes
• 40 Free High-Quality WordPress Themes
• 60 Free, Yet Premium Quality WordPress Magazine News Themes
• 14 Most Visually Appealing Free WordPress Themes
• 50 Beautiful Free WordPress Themes
• 45 Best Free WordPress Themes of All Time

and if you want a little bit more, here are some great Premium WordPress themes…

• 33 Places to Buy Quality Premium WordPress Themes

More WordPress Related Links…

WordCamps and WordPress Meetups

10 Years in Open Source!

Just realized this the other day and I can’t believe its been 10 years since I first released an open source project of my own.   April 21, 2000.

My first contribution to open source: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/125/12502.html

This goes way back to my days in TI calculator development in high school, who would have known that I’d still be passionately pursuing the same thing.  Wow an entire decade has passed and its crazy to think of everything I’ve developed since then.

Flash forward to today, April 21 2010, and my newest focus in open source has been with the use of the WordPress platform (something that didn’t even exist at the release of my calculator software).

As I continue to move forward sharing and contributing and learning from the open source community I couldn’t be any happier doing what I love the most.

I don’t plan on stopping any soon, for this is just the beginning…

2010: Products and Services I can’t live without

• Motorola Droid
  • This device is a huge epicenter to a lot of my interactions and productivity everyday.  From using Google Maps to find alternate routes skipping traffic to using it as my main connection to all of my social interactions, it’s surprising how valuable this device has become.  I’m absolutely in love with the Android platform.
• Gmail
  • For the past 7 years I’ve been strictly using GMail.  Not just Gmail, but also Google’s Apps which allows me to use the Gmail software with all of my other domain emails.  Organizing content heavily by labels and filters, this tool is amazing.
• WordPress
  • WordPress has quickly become a core to many of my web development projects.  With community and the ever growing library of plugins has made this open source platform stand out well beyond the rest.  Tell me it can’t be done with WordPress and I’ll show you it can.
• Last.fm
  • Without audioscrobbling, the service that works hand in hand with last.fm, I don’t know what better music recommendation engine there could be out there.  When I want to know about music, this is always one of the first sites I visit.
• Digg
  • Can content consumption get much better?  With social popularity of news articles and its aggregation of news from all over the internet, its my main site for news and updates.
• Evernote
  • A suggested tool after following the works of Tim Feriss, this quickly become my way of tracking notes.  With the use of the Firefox plugin and the Android app, my notes are easily saved and synced from anywhere.
• Foursquare
  • I think this is such an amazing thing.  Now that more and more of my friends are joining Foursquare, its great being able to see if they’re in town or at the same bar I’m at.  Also with the new focus for small businesses to encourage customers to become the mayor, I see a bright future for this tool.
• Amazon Prime
  • I typically go to border book shopping, but I buy nothing.  instead I use the Amazon Android app to take pictures of the covers of the books I want, and them to my wishlist.  Then in future time, I order the books I’m most interested in buying.  With Amazon Prime I’ll quickly have them within 2 days and save a butt load of money by using Amazon.
• Netflix
  • This has become the primary method of me watching movies, beyond the theatre.  With instant streaming to my Nintendo Wii and Bluray player, they just don’t make it much easier do they?
• Google Docs
  • This collection of tools wouldn’t be as impactful without its online collaboration and sharing.  When working with groups on projects, I always find myself using Google Docs.
• Picasa
  • I’ve not stored over 10,000 or so photos with Picasa.  This is so great when I want to show someone pictures of that past I can quickly login to Picasa where ever I am and enjoy.
• Jing
  • I find myself sharing and helping other a lot.  Or sometimes I need a quick screen capture.  This tool makes it quick and easy to do a screen capture and crop only what you want.  Even mark it up or circle/highlight things quickly.  Best of all, its free.
• Firebug
  • As a web developer I don’t know how I did development without it!  Its amazing how much more efficient my development has come with this Firefox extension.
• Google Voice
  • Two levels this tool is amazing.  First I never had to delete a voicemail and it’s even transcribed for searching (yet the transcription kinda sucks…for now).  Having these voicemails saved with Google I can listen to them without my phone on my computer.  So great when I’m getting back into work and I need to replay a message.  Second, international phone calls.  I couldn’t even tell you how much money this has probably saved me allowing me to make phone calls to Canada at no additional charge.  Thank you!!
• Facebook
  • We all know what Facebook is by now, hence the reason why I love it.  Being able to stay connected at the level Facebook provides has become part of all of our lifestyles.  That’s truly epic.
• Mint
  • Sometimes I really hate logging into my mint account because I’m reminded of spending that I totally forgot.  But in the reality, that’s what this tool is for.  It really is a great way to manage your money.
• Delicious
  • Having the Delicious extension in Firefox just makes it that much easier to save, share, and categorize my bookmarks.
• Bose QC 15s
  • Music will never be the same without these headphones.  I listen to my podcasts and music tracks on these all day long while I work and its freaking awesome!
• Tweetdeck
  • When I’m tweeting or trying to play catchup on Twitter, this tool couldn’t make it any easier.  Especially when at events and following a Twitter hash, this is great!
• LastPass
  • Password management is a huge issue as many of us know by now.  Using LastPass and its many browser extensions, I’ve quickly found a way to manage so many passwords by now.  Add a Ubikey for an additional layer of security and you have yourself one secure password management suite.

So there you have it a quick list of my favorites of 2010.  What are your products and services you can’t live without?

24 WordPress Plugins to extend WordPress beyond a blog

There’s been many times where people are amazed that WordPress can be used as a tool to not build a blog, but an honest looking professional website.  It wouldn’t be possible without the endless development of WordPress Plugins.

WordPress as a core is an appreciative blogging platform with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) publishing and some simple settings, but with plugins and themes you have everything you need to build a website many people would spend thousands of dollars for.  WordPress was developed with the focus for extensibility and it continues to practice this concept as WordPress continues to evolve and ultimately, get better.

I’ve followed the WordPress development channels and blogs for quite some time now and as new features are mentioned for the next version, the question, “Can that be a plugin?” has come up more often than not.  Actually most new features should start with this question.  The beauty of this concept allows WordPress to stay rather minimal and allow the user create the perfect WordPress setup with a collection of plugins.

This rather simple guide is here to share with you plugins that I’ve come to love over the years.  Hopefully I can share a few plugins and truly show you that WordPress is more powerful than you may have even known.

Core Plugins

These plugins have become standards, defaults, plugins I install on nearly every WordPress setup.  These core plugins setup my WordPress sites for search engine optimization (SEO), site tracking, and security.

Akismet

Akismet is one of two (Hello Dolly being the latter) plugins that comes packaged with every installation of WordPress.  Akismet protects your site from potential comment spam on your articles.  It’s accuracy is incredible.   If you’re planning on allowing comments on your WordPress site, Akismet should be activated and registered.  Akismet requires a WordPress.com key (which can be attained here).

All-In-One-SEO Pack

If you’re unfamiliar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I suggest you read this and this and this.  This plugin is designed to practice common SEO strategies.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin extend the strategies of SEO by creating an sitemap that is complaint with many search engines, such as Google.  To understand more about sitemaps read this.

Robots Meta

This plugin continues to expand the strageties of SEO as well as protect parts of your site out of search engines.  It does this by creating a robots.txt file.  This file is read and honored by search engines as what it should indexed when it crawls your site.  Learn more about robots.txt file here.

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress is strongly dependent on a database to store everything from your site’s settings to all the posts and pages you wrote.  When you think about it, the things in the database is the irreplaceable data to your site, the content that makes your site unique.  This plugin will allow you to automatically schedule periodic backups of your database, if in an unfortunate circumstance, you would lose your site.  This plugin even will email you a database backup file periodically.  I suggest you setup a GMail account just for WordPress database backups and get in the habit of setting up your WordPress sites to send the backups to that account.

Google Analyticator

If you’re not using Google Analytics by now, stop what you’re doing and go register yourself here.  Google Analytics is an extremely powerful and free tool to monitor and track your visitors on your site.  It will tell you how many hits you’re getting, where in the world your users are coming from and even tell you what search terms people are using to find your site.  This plugin extends and optimizes the setup of Google Analytics to your WordPress site.

WP Super Cache

This plugin will allow your WordPress site to be cached.  This basically means that your site is ready to potentially accept a potential spike of traffic without crashing.  You never know when it may happen, but who wants their site to fail when the most people want to see it?

Popular Feature Plugins

These plugins extend your WordPress site to include many popular features found on websites.  These features range from contact forms to e-commerce platforms to photo galleries to social media tools.  These aren’t the only plugins to achieve the extended functionality of WordPress sites, but they are my plugins of choice.

Adding Photos and Image Galleries

NextGen Gallery

This plugin is the ultimate plugin for creating photo galleries in WordPress.  Easily upload images, create slide shows, galleries with numerous image effects and automatically add watermarks to your images.

Adding Videos

Viper’s Video Quicktags

Getting video into your website can be somewhat tricky, but if you’re willing to use a social video service such as Youtube, Vimeo, or Metacafe, this is the plugin that will make integrating your videos much easier.  In some cases you have the option of customizing the design and layout of your video to better match the design of your site.

Adding Audio Players

Audio Player

This is by far the simplest way to get audio files to play on your site.   Upload your videos with WordPress’ media manager and then link your audio files inside of a post or page.  Here’s a great tutorial on doing just that.

Adding Downloads

WordPress Download Monitor

Sometimes there are situations where you want to offer file downloads such as PDFs or other files on your website.  Use this plugin to not only upload your files, but to protect its original location with its rewrite URL feature as well as keep track of the number of times the file is downloaded.

Adding Forms such as Contact Forms

cforms II – contact form

Contact forms are the most popular method for a user to submit content to you, the publisher.  This plugin will allow you to create simple to complex contact forms ranging from a simple “Contact Us” form to a detailed request form.

Gravity Forms

If you’re really serious about forms, Gravity Forms is by far the best plugin you’ll find to creating forms on your site, but it is a premuim plugin that costs some money.  Being that it is a premium plugin, you can definitely tell these guys are on top of things with this plugin, as they continue to better the overall form creation process.  Add to it, their support and this plugin is worth more than what you pay for.

Adding Content Ratings

GD Star Rating

This plugin will give you the ability to allow your users to vote and rate your posts.  If you’re creating a review website, you’re given a variety of options to displaying stars and multiple rating systems.

Adding Polls and Surveys

PollDaddy

PollDaddy is actually an independent solution for creating polls on your website.  This plugin simply allows you to integrate your polls you create in PollDaddy into your WordPress site.

Integrating Social Media

TweetMeme

Social media plays a huge role in the popularity of websites, Twitter being one of them.  This plugin is a solid choice of using TweetMeme to retweet your posts, allowing your users to easily share your content on your site to their followers on Twitter.

Digg Digg

This plugin allows you to add a collection of social voting icons to your blog posts.  If you’re looking to see and share the popularity of your content, this plugin will do the trick.

Sociable

Sociable is very similar to Digg Digg but includes a much large set of icons.  The icons are simple and not as dynamic as Digg Digg, but if you are looking for some of the more less popular social bookmarking links, this plugin has a large library to choose from.

Intergrating Advertisement

Easy Adsense

If you’re looking to integrate advertisement to your blog or website this plugin has numerous locations inside of your post/page content to insert advertisement code such as Google Adsense.

Selling Your Own Products (eCommerce)

WP e-Commerce

Selling products on your website might be what you’re site is all about.  This plugin has a variety of great features such as inventory management, multiple product images, digital product delivery and more.  If you’re looking to start a low cost shopping cart ecommerce website, this plugin will quickly bring you up to speed.

Shopp Plugin

This is by far my favorite ecommerce plugin, its premium (which means it costs money),  but for its relatively low price, its well worth it.  This plugin seamlessly integrates into the whole design of the WordPress admin and has great features such as coupon codes and multiple shipment and payment gateway integrations.

Advanced Feature Plugins

Integrating a Forum

BBPress

This isn’t really a plugin, but moreover an independent forum.  Its created by the same developers of WordPress and has easy integration to your WordPress blog/site to allow your WordPress users to interact with your forum with BBPress.  Think of this as an extension to WordPress, not a plugin.  Just a side note, integrating a BBPress site to your WordPress site has an independent theme, so you may have to create a custom theme to match your current WordPress theme; that is if you want to make your site with a forum look seamless.

Creating a Social Network

Buddypress

Until recently Buddypress was standalone similar to BBPress, but now Buddypress is official a WordPress plugin.  BuddyPress easily lets you transform your WordPress blog into your own social network. The features are ever increasing and is a great way to create or develop your own social network about your topic, company, or brand.

Creating a Membership

WP Wishlist Member

If you are looking to create a multi-tier membership only site, this plugin is for you.  Its a premium plugin, but has the ability to turn your WordPress blog into a membership site hiding all of your content and only making it available to your members.  Starting a coaching club or a membership site of software or other digital assets?  I strongly recommend using this plugin.

Conclusion

There you have it a rather short list of excellent plugins that I’ve grown to love over time with the development of WordPress blogs and projects.  Have you used any of these plugins?  What is your thoughts on any of these?  What are some other favorite and essential plugins that you absolutely love?

Understanding the cloud and how easy it is to start using cloud computing for your website

I’ve been asked a few times lately about cloud computing and using the cloud for your web site/services so I thought I would share a little.  I’ve been using the cloud for a couple years now for various services (mainly storage). As it’s popularity continues to grow and standards for cloud computing continue to form, I think the ability to efficiently optimize many aspects of your website with cloud computing is definitely worth it’s interest!  Let me share with you…

What is cloud computing?

This is probably the biggest question.  What the hell is cloud computing?

So lets think of the traditionally conventional method of a website and how it is connected to the internet. You have a server, which is nothing much more than a computer configured to host a website and a connection to the internet.  Your server has disk space, computing process power and applications that allow you to make the processing power and disk space accessible through connections to the internet.  The disk space holds all of the files and applications that run your website and the processing power is responsible on how quickly these files and applications can deliver results to the end user.

So it has always been thought that the more disk space you have for your website, faster processing power, and faster internet connection you have available will provide the best results for your web site.  The problem with this is it really isn’t that efficient and can be very costly to have a server and internet connection like this.  You could be potentially paying monthly payments for unused disk space and bandwidth.

This is where cloud computing comes in.

Instead of thinking of a website that resides on a server (or a discrete number of servers), with a discrete number of processes and a discrete number of connections to the internet, we have the cloud.  The cloud is a software as a service (this is what we call Amazon’s S3, EC3, and CloudFront, for example) which actually is a large network of servers and connections virtualized.

Amazon’s service is a massive software application that is responsible for where files are stored, where processing power comes from and what connection to use to serve your files.

So now Amazon has this ambiguous enigmatic mecca server (the cloud) that everyone shares its storage, processing and distribution power.  The beauty of this is each user of the cloud no longer has to purchase or allocate so much memory and processing power for their website, instead using a SaaS such as Amazon allows you to only use what you need.  This means you only pay for the storage you use, the processing you generate and the number of requests you make.

Everything is incremental and becomes very efficient for you.

With cloud computing services you no longer pay for a large server of gigs upon gigs of memory where you only use maybe 10% of it and a large throttle of bandwidth which you’ll be lucky to use 10% of that. Now with a company such as Amazon, they can provide you with a service, to host files, to provide you with strong processing power, and efficiently fast deliverability.  A website now can be optimized by using cloud computing services to host files and process tasks.

What about the security of the cloud?

The next question raised is the matter of security.  Having a non-finite number of users who access and use the cloud opens potential vulnerabilities which would allow the wrong exploit to cause massive damage.  The security of the files are currently controlled by ACL settings and internal security settings of your cloud service provider.  Since you don’t know the exactly physical location of your files and exactly where your process is coming from, you’re putting a lot of trust in your cloud service provider (such as Amazon) on the integrity of your files, yet that will soon be regulate as standards of the cloud come into play.  I read an article that said there are 8 (or possibly more) groups working on creating the standards for the cloud.  As early as the cloud concept is, I think its only going to better in time.

Should I use the cloud?

I definitely think you should. Actually, a hybrid of the cloud and a secure server setup.  Think of it like this, continue to use your server(s) like you would to host your website, but outsource the less important things to the cloud.  This means public images, video files, PDFs and such (mostly media) should be stored and hosted on the cloud where the more important private and secure files are still on your main server setup.

What this will do is allow you to use a server setup with less hard disk space allocated to files and less bandwidth for delivering the files.  The cloud will host the files and efficiently deliver the files faster (as a service). Now you can be more economical by only paying for the hard drive space and bandwidth you need.

How to get started on the cloud

It’s actually easy than you can imagine to using the cloud. I’ve been using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and CloudFront to delivering files on a website.  Amazon S3 is a storage solution that allows you to store files as either a public or private storage box.  Using Amazon S3 for your website will make your files public, but very efficient on the amount of disk space and bandwidth you use, since you only pay for what you use.

Here are the current prices on Amazon S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

As you can see there are 3 different things you can be charged for:

• Storage – This is a price you pay per GB that your files are being hosted on S3
• Data Transfer – This is a price you pay per GB of transfer you make to and from S3
• Requests - This is the price you pay on the number of actions you make on the S3 service.

Amazon provides a monthly calculator to see how much it would cost to use their AWS services here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Now that you’ve gotten an idea on how much it will cost to use Amazon S3, the next step is actually using it.

Transferring files is as simple as using a software application that looks similar to your favorite FTP application.  I like to use Cloudberry which available free to download here: http://cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=cloudberry-explorer-amazon-s3

After you’ve installed Cloudberry, you’ll need to connect Cloudberry to your Amazon S3 account.

Here’s how you can do this:

1. Open CloudBerry and click File->Amazon S3 Accounts
2. Double-click New Account
3. Give your Account a name (if you plan on connecting to more than one Amazon S3 Account this is useful, otherwise you’ll probably only have one S3 account).
4. Next you’ll need two things from your Amazon Web Services account.  Go to http://aws.amazon.com and login to your Amazon account.
5. Click on Your Account->Security Credentials. 
6. You should see a Access Keys tab, if you don’t have one created yet, create one.  You’ll need the access key ID and secret access key.
7. Enter both of these values into Cloudberry.  At this point Cloudberry is connected to your Amazon S3 Account and you’re ready to start uploading files to the cloud!
8. You’ll notice that Cloudberry looks similar to an FTP client.  On the left side is your computer then (after selecting your S3 account from the drop down box) on your right side your Amazon S3 account.
9. Now you’ll need to create a bucket.  A bucket is Amazon’s terminology for a folder to store files on the cloud.  Click the blue bucket icon to create a new bucket.
10. After you’ve created a bucket, you can upload files to that bucket simply by browsing and dragging files from your computer on the left to the bucket on the right.
11. Next we need to set the ACL settings of the file so that it is accessible by other websites.  Right click the file on your S3 account on the right, choose ACL->ACL Settings and click on [Public (everyone)]. Click [Ok] and now the file is public for access.
12. Finally we need to know the absolute URL of the file to access.  Right-click the file and choose [Web URL]. This will show you the absolute URL of your file.  For example, if you’re using S3 to host your images, you can use this URL when referencing it on your website as the source of the image.
13. That’s it you’re now successfully using the cloud to store and access a file for your website.

A step further…

If you want to optimize the use of the cloud further you can also use your Amazon S3 files in conjunction with Amazon’s CloudFront.  Amazon CloudFront is a network of edges (locations where files can reside) which will make your file accessible from multiple locations to improve on latency and bandwidth.  Amazon CloudFront will optimize the delivery of your file, by delivering your file to the closest location the file resides.

Think of it like this, you’re neighbor recently viewed a file on Amazon S3, instead of requesting Amazon S3 for the file again, Amazon CloudFront will be able to see that the file was recently accessed from a closer position and deliver it to you faster.  This does decrease the bandwidth costs of your Amazon S3 account, but is made up by using Amazon CloudFront.  Actually the bandwidth rates are the same, so to use Amazon CloudFront or not, will not drastically effect the cost of using Amazon Cloud services.

Using the CloudFront will actually be much more efficient for your website by delivering files to your web users much faster.

Here are Amazon CloudFront prices: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/#pricing

Here’s how you can integrate Amazon CloudFront with your Amazon S3 account:

1. Open Amazon’s AWS Management Console here: https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/home
2. Click [Create Distribution]
3. Select your Amazon S3 Bucket you created above and click [Create]
4. Now you need to modify the URL that you got in step 12 above so that it is hitting Amazon CloudFront’s edge network.  For example the file I added has an absolute URL of http://anthonymontalbano.s3.amazonaws.com/anthony.jpg
5. We need to replace the bucket URL (which is anthonymontalbano.s3.amazonaws.com with the edge network of d34k2wyjxt4ma5.cloudfront.net)  so my new URL for my file hosted on the cloud is http://d34k2wyjxt4ma5.cloudfront.net/anthony.jpg
6. That’s it! You are now using two Amazon cloud services to distribute and deliver files to your website efficiently and much more cost effective than before!

Side note: If you’re comfortable setting up CNAME you can create one to hide the dirty URL that Amazon gives you.  This means that a URL such as http://d34k2wyjxt4ma5.cloudfront.net/anthony.jpg and simply become http://media.room3064.com/anthony.jpg. To do this you will need to edit your DNS settings with your webhost that is managing your website.

Summary

Hopefully by now you have a better idea of what the cloud is and how you can use it to deliver content on your website much more efficiently and maybe save you some money as well.  As the cloud evolves and standards and services become more available, the idea of the cloud can be used to host a website in it’s entirety!  Actually for files that are accessed by more than one web location, we can be much more efficient with delivering these files using the cloud.  Get use to the idea that a file doesn’t have one simple location (or cached location) to access it, yet it’s true location is managed and delivered by the cloud to speed up efficiency.

I think as the potential behind the technology and services will create a whole new dynamic for how we build, design, and manage websites.

So, are you on the cloud yet?