Cloud Servers are easy with Jollat
One of the things I’ve found about EC2 is that while it’s very powerful, managing servers and processes from the command line can be intimidating, and raises the barrier of entry into this exciting world. There are services like RightScale, but those services, while more user-friendly, can be expensive1 for the institution that wants to learn more about cloud servers and how to manage them.
Jollat is a new cross-platform management tool for Amazon EC2 and S3. You can turn on, manage and turn off server instances easily. You can also create storage buckets in the US or EU and easily manage them.
Here’s a quick video:
You can use Jollat free for 30 days, and it’s only $66 to purchase a license. I think it’s that’s a great price if you want to use EC2 sparingly for projects on your campus.
1 - RightScale offers a free developer account that you can use to create and manage servers, but you don’t get the entire feature set unless you subscribe to their services.
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The ReCaptcha MailHide API
I liked Michael Fienen’s post at doteduguru.com yesterday about obfuscating email addresses - lots of good methods to try to hide email addresses from spam robots, even though sometimes we’ve already lost the war on spam and robots scraping out sites. Would the fight be better fought on the spam filter and blocking end? Hard to say.
I tweeted Fienen yesterday that ReCaptcha also has a mail hiding API that makes the user solve a CAPTCHA before getting access to your email address. Here’s an example: i…@highedwebtech.com (hint, click on the … bit before the @).
I like this system because the validation of the captcha is handled by ReCaptcha. You could easily roll this out using their API to many of your pages easily. This method also addresses accessibity as you can get an audio captcha as well.
However, the downside is that a user would need to complete one of these each time they want an e-mail address. I get notes from faculty members often that tell me they want to get email addresses for a bunch of students quickly sometimes and captcha’s and the like slow them down.
Back in June, I blogged about using ReCaptcha on the majority of the forms at my school. We’ve got a centralized system that allows users to build web forms and they were getting hammered. Adding in the ReCaptcha has pretty much stopped that spam, which is nice.
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Evernote Beta Invites
I’ve been using Evernote for a few weeks and seeing if its something that would fit into my personal organization tools and workflow, joining the ranks of Sandy, Jott and Twitter as things that help keep me going and organized.
Evernote is a web based app that keeps track of your notes, links, and other stuff. It’s searchable and sortable by tags, and has a desktop client you can use that also syncs up with the web to keep your account up to date whenever you need to look up something.
I used it at work last week to jot down some notes about hosting on and off campus, and when I was finishing up the “5 reasons to leave your hosting on-site” post, I opened up the desktop app at home and found my notes quickly and easily. Good stuff.
Evernote is in beta right now, but I’ve got 20 invites to share. Twitter, email or leave me a comment and I’ll get one to you.
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