ztay: 2009

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Setting up Amazon CloudFront

We use Amazon CloudFront, as our "CDN" to store The Javascript, CSS, Images, and html for the Print Friendly widget and site.

It's pretty fast and easy to setup. As for skills needed, anyone that can create a blog or download a torrent can figure it out.

Here's how to do it.

Create an Amazon Account.
Sign up for S3 and create your "buckets". Buckets are like folders on a server, but buckets live on many servers around the world.
Sign up for Cloudfront, using your "Access Key ID". * Go to your Account and click on "Access Identifiers"

That's it, now you're CDN is setup.

Next step is adding and removing files, right? We use Firefox Change-arounds. It works like FTP application and you can manage upload/delete your files.

Friday, March 20, 2009

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Pretty Smooth. Gave the Doors some funk! Check out about 3:10 seconds into the song; the bongos and Hendrix riffing is cool landscape.

Snoop's rapping seems a little cheesy and and-out-of-date. He kind of turns it into a made-for-movie song, and I have no idea what he's talking about. I think cause whatever he's saying sounds cheesy and uninteresting.

Snoop's not bad. The song is nice to listen to. He's got a great voice and sweet rap. But it's the "doggie" stuff. It's just so retro.

I just cant imagine snoop running from the police. Not now. The guy is bigger than Wall Street.

He needs to get current. Get a new name. And, start rapping about being a big business man and kicking ass. Doing better than wall street. Smarter than big business. Winning, etc.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Rockstars

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It's great to jam with a rockstar.

I just had a great jam session with Vamsee Kanakala.

Vamsee is a rebel. Unlike most smart kids in India who study safe and lucrative technologies like Windows or Sun technologies, Vamsee studied open-source! He did it when it wasn't cool!

He's ahead of the curve in lots of ways. Love Ruby on Rails. Finds cool services like Slicehost.com. Reads cool blogs like smashingmagazine.com. Yes... he reads design blogs!

The technical things are a snap for him. Figured out a scalable solution and Setup Amazon CloudFront without breaking sweat.

He's an entrepreneur, http://www.viamentis.com/. And, he even has more twitter followers than me! http://twitter.com/vamsee

Ok, so here's what's cool. Today we launched www.PrintNicer.com. PrintNicer creates a print friendly version of any webpage. We remove the ads, media, backgrounds, and sometimes even the site navigation from pages. You can also edit the page in PrintNicer. You remove content images, comments, or paragraphs. Last cool thing is you can generate a PDF of the page.

It's a widget kind of like addtoany.com, sharethis.com, getthis.com.

Bloggers and site owners can put a PrintNicer print button like this.

To check it out, go to hubpages. Here's a link. The print button is kind of buried so you got to search for it... :p
http://hubpages.com/hub/Lose-Love-Handles

It was kind of ballsy launching with HubPages. They get over 10,000,000 visitors a month and between 500,000 to 750,000 pageviews a day. That's not easy into it, that's a jumping into it!

Well, we survived! Launch went smooth. There's a few things we really want to improve. But, no major errors.

It takes a rockstar to pull that off, and that's what Vamsee Kanakala is. It was a pleasure to jam with him!