New Book about Amazon Web Services Development
As you can probably tell from a bunch of posts here, I’m a huge fan of cloud computing and distributed services. We use Amazon’s suite of services and I’ll be giving several talks this summer about them and our uses of them.
In my insatiable quest for knowledge, I’m excited for the following book to be published: Programming Amazon Web Services. The book will cover several of Amazon’s services: S3, EC2, SQS and FPS. Here’s a quick snippet from Amazon:
Building on the success of its storefront and fulfillment services, Amazon now allows businesses to “rent” computing power, data storage and bandwidth on its vast network platform. This book demonstrates how developers working with small- to mid-sized companies can take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service (FPS), and SimpleDB to build web-scale business applications.
The book is released on March 28. I hope it’s in O’Reilly’s Safari service. Our institution subscribes to that.
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Seeing Your Site from Off-Campus
We have sections and information on our website that changes depending on whether you are on-campus or off-campus. I develop on-campus, but sometimes need to see the site from that off-campus perspective. What’s a developer to do?
I could walk home and check the site from there, but that’s a pain. I could also setup my home machine with VNC or OS X’s screen sharing, but that too is a pain and a potential security hole. Instead, I go the easy route and use a couple of browser-based proxies that show me the view of my website from off-campus.
The first tool I use is Proxify. The site is fast and easy to use - and if you want additional features or more usage credits, you can pay a couple of dollars a month for premium access. If you don’t pay, you may occasionally be locked out during times of high usage.
Privax runs a series of proxies that are also free. Their sites run under a bunch of different names. For job security reasons, I’d recommend shying away from the following: hidemyass.com, proxypimp.com or BoratProxy.com. I’d stick to something a little tamer. I use vulb.com as my Privax site of choice, but it’s up to you.
If you’d like to explore more options, here’s a list of web-based proxies.
Be aware when using these proxies: they will affect your browsing in different ways. Some strip out javascript, cookies and other functionality. Others will insert ads around your site. Some will not let you use a web form to post anything (I can imagine this has been abused on blogs by people wanting to post really anonymous comments.) But, if all your testing is whether certain content is showing, this is a good way to go.
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The 80/20 Rule
I’ll be honest. Before last night, I had no idea who Gary Vaynerchuk was. I was doing a little surfing around the Twittersphere and I landed on his site and watched a few of his videos. This video blew my mind and it’s a heck of a way to kick the week off.
This video has so many higher ed connections. I think you can apply it to not just the school-prospective student relationship, but also our development relationships with departments across campus. I will work harder and better this week on those connections.
From Gary’s site, I surfed over to his company, Wine Library, which is a wine ecommerce site. Every day, Gary samples different wines and videoblogs the results. It’s live and off the cuff and very engaging. I don’t know thing one about wine, but I was up until 2:30 a.m. watching a bunch of episodes and it makes me want to go out and buy a bottle of Chateauneu du Pape.
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