Vimeo Plus
I’ve been a fan of Vimeo’s video hosting site for awhile now - and now they’ve gone and made it even better. They’ve (finally) introduced a pay service, called Vimeo Plus, that gives users additional bandwidth and features. Here’s a video that talks about the new features:
Introducing Vimeo Plus! from Vimeo Staff on Vimeo.
To recap, Plus users get priority upload and encoding, 2GB a week of uploads, no ads, and maybe most importantly, the ability to embed HD videos1 anywhere you choose. All of this is available for $59 a year.
We’ve signed up - and the process was smooth and easy. I’ve definitely noticed the increased speed in processing our videos as well. You can see the videos we’ve posted there here.
1 - With the plus account, you get 1,000 HD embeds. After that, you can purchase more as you need them.
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RightScale
I’ve blogged in the past about RightScale when talking about managing your Amazon EC2 instances. They have a nice platform and developers can get a free account with limited services to get your feet wet in the service. I have such an account and have launched a few servers with it. I wasn’t setting my ports to open correctly, so I couldn’t connect to it via SSH or HTTP, but that’s my fault, not RightScale’s.
Yesterday, when talking about Amazon’s various announcements, I called Rightscale “expensive.” I’d like to clarify that a bit. In my position as a web development manager at a small, liberal-arts college, RightScale looks, at first glance, expensive. But, if you were a small or medium sized business who was migrating a lot of services towards AWS and EC2, a solution like RightScale makes a lot of sense, and in that scenario, is really quite affordable. Being able to quickly and easily scale up and down your server instances is probably worth the price of admission alone. But mostly, it’s takes a large amount of the work out of managing, maintaining and scaling your EC2 based servers. That’s something you can directly look at and see the ROI, in terms of staff time, up or down time and other infrastructure resources.
I got an email yesterday from the CTO of Rightscale, and I’ve asked if I can send him some questions to answer about RightScale, higher education usage and more.
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Wordpress 2.6.3 released
Wordpress 2.6.3 is now available for download. If you use Wordpress as your blogging software or CMS, you should upgrade. Older versions of Wordpress are often the ones that are hacked, so you should always keep your software up to date.
I’d recommend the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I did the upgrade this morning in just a few minutes. I think this plugin should be merged with the Wordpress source code and be a regular feature for all users. That’d go a long way to stop spammers and hackers who exploit older and unprotected sites.
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