I took the plunge

Wow. It is amazing how much progress has been made on certain computer fronts. I came across this article about serving your media files with Amazon’s S3 service and decided to take the plunge. I have been reading a lot of good things about S3. Like how you can treat it as a remote backup location. Like how SmugMug uses it under the covers to store their data. And now this article. Apparently you can store any file and S3 will just serve it up.

And it really was easy. Well almost. Signing up for the service is a snap. I used S3Fox to transfer my images over. My first problem was realizing that the default ACL was that only you could read (or write) the file. So I had to change all of the ACLs such that everyone could at least read the files. But I don’t think that S3Fox is designed for as many files as I had. I had 1920 files and only the first 1000 had the correct ACLs. I finally got frustrated enough to write a Python script to change the ACLs of any file that did not have public access.

Then I had to add a new subdomain that would resolve to S3 domain. That was very easy with zoneedit.com! I love zoneedit. And its a free service if you are a relatively unknown person like myself.

Next up was changing over 700 entries in Movable Type. I had to change all img’s and href’s to the new location. Fortunately, MT has a global search and replace feature! And it worked for 90% of the entries. I had to fix a couple after MT borked them.

So tell me if you notice anything different. Or broken.