I am a big fan of visual resumes and if you enjoy them as well, here are some more designs for your inspiration.
Large graphics, minimal text and a bit of creativity – this is all it takes to turn a boring resume into something beautiful and appealing. You may also want to check these tips on designing visual resumes.
You have previously seen sarees, board games, postcards and even drinks that draw inspiration from Google and to add to that list, here’s a wedding invitation card that’s purely ‘made’ of Google search results. And it’s 100% real!
Nagalakshmi Viswanathan, who currently works at Google Singapore and is the author of Edible Garden, a popular blog on Indian cooking, designed this unique card using PowerPoint to invite her Google colleagues to her wedding. Smart!
As you may have previously noticed, the embedded version of YouTube Player now offers a handy ‘Watch Later’ feature that lets you add the current video to a queue with a click. You can then conveniently watch all these ‘queued’ videos later when you have the time.
There’s one minor problem though.
YouTube is ‘the’ most popular video sharing website but it’s not the only one around. You have sites like Vimeo, TED, Break.com, Facebook, Revver, etc. that host awesome video content and wouldn’t it be nice if we could extend the same ‘watch later’ functionality of YouTube to these sites as well?
Enter RadBox – a useful web app that lets you bookmark web videos from all the popular sites to a common queue. You can then watch these videos later from one central location.
You can bookmark videos in two ways. First, there’s the Instapaper-style bookmarklet that will save an embedded video to the Radbox queue without you have to leave the page. Or you can simply email the video URL to an email address, an option that will help you bookmark videos even from mobile phones.
Radbox currently supports all the popular video websites include YouTube, Vimeo, College Humour, Google Videos and more. Once you are done watching a video, you can either delete it from the Radbox queue or move it to the archive.
Also see: Most Useful Websites
Our good friends at HP have provided us with 5 units of HP Photosmart Premium printers that we can give away to our readers in India. I have been using this printer for about a week and it makes printing so much more convenient and fun. Here’s how you can get one for yourself.
The Photosmart series of HP printers is kind of unique because it supports wireless printing but without requiring any complicated set-up. This thing works out-of-the-box and there’s no software to install or drivers to download.
Just switch on the printer and it will automatically recognize all the available wireless (Wi-Fi) networks in that area – select any one of them and your printer is now ready to receive print jobs from anywhere in the world. You don’t need to attach the printer to your computer even once to get it running.
These HP printers have been assigned a unique email address and any document, email or photograph that you send to that particular email address, will get printed within a minute or two. You can therefore send print jobs from your mobile phone, your laptop or any other device that can send email.
In addition to email based printing, these HP Photosmart printers are also AirPrint enabled. That means you send print jobs from your iOS device, like the iPad or an iPhone, with a simple click. Earlier you had to transfer files to a computer for printing but with these printers, you don’t have to bother turning on the computer.
Anyone with your printer’s email address can send a print job. If you would like to prevent this from happening, you can create a ‘whitelist’ of email address and it will automatically reject print requests from non-approved addresses. Alternatively, you may reset your printer’s email address and cancel any pending jobs from the online dashboard.
Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how easy it is to print files from mobile phones (using email) and from iOS devices (through AirPrint).
These HP Photosmart printers come pre-installed with a set of useful apps to help you access and print web content directly through the printer.
For instance, you may print your daily dose of Sudoku puzzles, coloring pages with Disney characters for your kids, news provided by Yahoo, Facebook photos, and more – all with the click of a button. If you need driving directions, you can download the Bing Maps app from the HP ePrint store (Google Maps app is no longer available).
Overall, printing becomes a lot more convenient with these printers and since there are no wires, you can place the unit anywhere on the floor. In my tests, AirPrint based printing was flawless and instant but there were instances when email based print jobs got stuck in the queue for no specific reason. I also wish there were more printing apps in the HP store. They promised one for Google Docs but am not sure if it coming anytime soon.
Giveaway: 5 HP Photosmart Printers
To participate in the giveaway, all you need to do is answer this short quiz and we’ll pick five lucky winners early next week. This is open to all residents of India.
Should you have any questions, drop a comment on our Facebook page. The 4 printer units will be shipped directly by HP while the fifth winner will get my review unit.
Old newspapers and magazines offer a wealth of insight into history and critical events as they were unfolding at that time. In the past, the only way to get hold of this treasure trove of information was your local library where the back issues of certain newspapers and magazines may have been preserved.
Fortunately, the Internet and digitization of content has made everything just a click away and now you can access previous issues of old newspapers almost as easily as today’s newspaper that’s lying on your coffee table.
Here are some of the best places on the web where you can find and read old newspapers and magazines online.
1. Google News - Google News indexes thousands of newspaper websites from around the world and organizes news in clusters for easy reading. In addition to current news, Google News also offers access to stories published in old newspapers that you can search for free.
Although many of these newspaper issues are scanned images of the original printed version, you can use Google search to find stories inside the papers through the magic of OCR.? The actual content is hosted on other sites and Google will show if it cost any money to read that issue /news story.
2. Google Books - If you’re looking for an older issue of a magazine, Google Books might be the best place to find it.
These magazines are scanned and searchable and can be read online using the standard Google Book interface.? Decades worth of material are available, and the magazines are laid out just as they were when they were originally printed.? You can read archived magazines cover to cover, including the original articles, index, cover, and advertisements.
3. Trove - The National Library of Australia has a large selection of newspapers from across Australia archived online that anyone may read for free.? All the newspapers are completely scanned and can be viewed online in any modern browser, or you may download them as a PDF for offline reading.
4. Library of Congress - The Library of Congress has a large repository of historic newspapers published in America between 1880 and 1922, available as PDFs.
Though the library has made available newspapers from 14 states and Washington, DC., these states contain some of the largest newspapers and thus the archives are still a very valuable resource.? Additionally, the site has a database of records of all newspapers printed in America from 1690 to the present, including newspapers that are currently not published.
5. Newseum – Here you can find and download front pages of 800+ newspapers from around the world and the newspaper gallery is updated every day. The collection includes small-town and local newspapers as well as globally-distributed big papers.? They also maintain an archive of newspaper front pages belonging to dates of significant importance (for example, see the September 11 archive).
6. The Olden Times - If you’re looking for a popular article about a major historical event, the Olden Times may be a good place to look for it.? Although they do not contain entire newspapers, they do have snippets including popular news articles, print advertisements, and personal information sections such as births and obituaries.? All content is free, and the content ranges from between 1788 and 1920.
7. OMA – Like The Olden Times but for past magazine issues. Old Magazine Articles contains magazine pages covering from famous historical events. The articles can be downloaded as PDF files for free though they have been mildly edited to remove advertisements from the original magazines.
8. Wayback Machine – Simply enter a news website address into the search box (nytimes.com for example), and the Wayback machine will show you a list of snapshots of that site. You can then read the news as it appeared on that day. It also includes collections of news articles from major events like the Asian Tsunami of 2004.
9. NewspaperARCHIVE – This is the world’s largest online archive of historical newspapers published from 1753 onwards.? You can browse newspaper issues by date or find articles that match a particular phrase. NewspaperARCHIVE costs $9.99 a month if you subscribe for an year.
10. Ancestry.com - Although Ancestry.com is designed for building family trees or for finding information about your ancestors, its archives also includes thousands of newspapers and periodicals dating back to the 1700's. Subscriptions start at $19.95/month or $12.95/month if paid per year.
1. Times Machine – This has archived editions of The New York Times from 1851 through 1922. The issues are identical to the original newspapers, and include all pages including the advertisements.
2. Times Archive - The Times. the daily paper from the UK, offers digital archives of issues from 1785 to 1985 on their website.? All pages of the papers are completely scanned, and are additionally organized with an index of topics.? You can read the articles highlighted on their front page for free while specific papers and articles are available for ￡4.95/day.
3. Boston Globe – All issues of The Boston Globe newspaper printed since 1924 are available online. You can access all news articles printed since 1979 for free while the older articles are available at $2.95 for a single article.
4. BBC – The On This Day section of BBC offers an online archive of some of the most significant stories broadcast by BBC News since 1950.?? You can select any date from the menu at the top of the page, and view the news from that date as well as today’s historical news.
5. Press Display – This is like online newspaper kiosk where you can find current and past issues of hundreds of newspapers and magazines in full-color, full-page format. Individual issues cost 99￠ each and you may also download them on your Windows PC, Mac or mobile devices for offline reading.
Also see: How to Read WSJ for Free
YouTube and some other video hosting websites now let you upload video clips that are up to 15 minutes in length but given the short attention span of Internet users, it is highly unlikely that people will stay with your video for that long.
So how long is too long for an online video?
Wistia, a video hosting service that also provides video tracking – like which parts of a video are popular with the online audience, when does their interest begin to fade and when do they quit watching a video altogether – has some interesting data to share in this regard.
Shorter is better
Wistia’s data suggest that shorter videos are more engaging that the longer ones and that people are more likely to watch the full video if it is short in length.
They found that 30-second video clips were viewed by 85% people all the way through while the completion rate was only 50% for videos that were between 2 to 10 minutes in length.
Wistia also suggests that you should consider putting the best stuff, the part that you want people to see, within the first 20 seconds of the video before they get distracted.
Related: Check my video screencasts on YouTube.
While the frequency may have reduced, you do sometimes come across misleading ads on Google search results pages or even on sites that are part of the Google AdSense program (like this one).
What surprises even more is the fact that advertisers are able to use Google’s own AdWords system to promote AdSense related products that are nothing but scams. See this recent screenshot of Google’s front page for a popular query like “AdSense.”
All the Google ads that you see in the above screenshot promise to offer you an “AdSense account” for some amount of money.
My conversation with an advertiser
Curious to know how this system works, I made a phone call to one of these advertisers and he suggested that I share my name, address and other details so that they can get an AdSense account for me. He stressed that he has contacts with people at Google and therefore its easy for him to get an account vis-à-vis me applying to Google directly.
He also promised me a readymade website – on topics ranging from cars to sports to bollywood – and I will be paid anywhere between 2￠ and $25 per click on that site. There’s more. He suggested that I share the URL with all my friends on Orkut and Facebook and ask them to click the ads for ‘quick money.’
I then called another advertiser and the story was no different. He went a step further and promised that my AdSense account will get approved within 24 hours of him receiving the payment (he even gave me his bank details).
I wonder why Google is letting this happen and that too through their own advertising network where they have complete control?
iPad doesn’t support Flash but in the following screenshot, you can easily see a Flash based YouTube video player in the foreground and an Adobe AIR app running somewhere towards the right side.
Surprised? Well, there’s no magic here. This is done using the incredibly simple join.me service that lets you stream your computer screen to any other computer or iOS device over the Internet with a click.
Join.me, if you are new, is an extremely simple screen sharing tool that is available for both Mac and Windows. You initiate a screen sharing session on your desktop and it will provide you with a unique code that others may use to view your desktop screen from their own computers.
Join.me also provides an iOS app so that iPhone and iPad users can also participate in your screen sharing session from anywhere.
The apps are free, incredibly easy to use and also supports text chat so you may not just watch the presenter's screen while on the go but also interact with the meeting participants.
Also see: My Favorite iPad Apps
The following chart represents the growth of various social networking sites in India during the past year. The dark bar represents the total number of unique visitors for a site in Nov '09 while the lighter bar represents the same number for Nov '10.
As is obvious from the chart, Facebook experienced enormous growth in India, rising to the top spot, while previous market-leader Orkut has more or less stagnated in this period. LinkedIn and Twitter have also managed to nearly double their audience in a year.
While most old-time Orkut users may have migrated to Facebook, Orkut numbers have not declined because the site is still hugely popular in Tier-II and Tier-III towns of India.
These numbers are based on comScore data and were originally published in the latest issue of Business Today. Thank you Kalpana Behara for the tip.
A temporary email address could come handy in situations where you don’t want to share your primary email address because of the risk of spam.
Now there are quite a few services on the web, Mailinator and 10MinuteMail for example, that have long offered temporary email addresses for free but with certain limitations.
For example, these services provide receive-only inboxes so you can’t send email to someone using your temporary address. Second, these addresses auto-expire after a certain time and then you may have to generate a new one. Finally, we don’t have much of a clue about the companies that run these services and their privacy policies.
If you have been looking for a more reliable temporary email service but without any limitations, it’s time to log in to your old Hotmail account at mail.live.com.
Microsoft has added a new feature in Windows Live Hotmail that will let you create aliases for your main email address and the good part is that all these aliases can be managed though the same Inbox. Google Apps also supports email aliases but not Gmail.
I really like the way they have implemented aliases in Hotmail (see the video above). All incoming email for an alias gets stored in a separate folder, outside your main Inbox, and if you are getting too much spam for an alias, simply delete it from your account.
You may associate up to five different aliases with your Hotmail account.
Technically, this is quite similar to creating a new Gmail account that auto-forwards to your main Inbox and then you set up a filter for routing those messages. However, for people who aren’t that technically inclined, Hotmail’s approach is a winner.
How do you know if your email message has been read by the recipient(s)?
One option is that you embed a tracking image in your outgoing email messages. If that image downloads on to the recipient's computer, it is a confirmation that your email has been opened and read. Obviously, this technique will only work if the recipient has enabled automatic image downloads and that he or she is reading your email in HTML and not plain text.
There’s another option as well. If your outgoing email messages include one or more hyperlinks, you may even consider taking the help of a URL shortening service like goo.gl for email tracking.
The idea is pretty simple. Before including an hyperlink in your email, shorten it with goo.gl first. Now if the recipient opens your email and clicks on the link, his activity will be captured which you can see by simply adding a + sign to the Google short URL.
For instance, if the short URL of your link is goo.gl/abc, you can see the click stats for that short URL on goo.gl/abc+ or goo.gl/info/abc. Hover over the click points in the graph and you’ll even get to know the time when the person clicked your link in the email.
This of course is based on the assumption that your email messages have one or more hyperlinks and that the recipients are keen to click on them for you to track their activity.
Related: Tracking Clicks in Emails Using Google Analytics
Facebook recently upgraded the site's photo viewer such that pictures and associated user comments now appear in a dark pop-up window. This new layout of photos is live for most Facebook users though it looks a bit ugly and doesn't seem to gel with the otherwise very-elegant design of Facebook.com website.
If you are viewing a photo in Facebook and would like to switch to the classic layout - where photos are displayed without a pop-up - just press the F5 key on your keyboard.
This will refresh the current Facebook page and the photo will display on its own page without the lightbox effect. Watch the above screencast for details.
Related: How to Download Facebook Photos
If you are on Twitter for fun and tweet only to connect with your friends, please skip this.
Let’s say you want to find out the best time to write a tweet such that it gets read by a maximum number of your followers on Twitter who in-turn may decide to retweet it to further help spread the word?
There are two approaches to this problem. For instance, you may find the time period when your followers are least active on Twitter and avoid tweeting during that time. This increases the likelihood of them noticing your tweets.
Timely is however a more innovative solution to finding the perfect time for tweeting. The app analyzes your last 200 tweets and then shortlists the ones that have been retweeted. The more retweets you get in a particular time bucket, the more you should try to tweet in that bucket.
Just enter your Twitter handle in the Timely box to find your perfect time.
Also, there can’t be a standard time that works for all Twitter accounts because it mostly depends on your followers as well as their location. If you are based in U.S. but a majority of your followers are in India, your tweets will probably perform better if you tweet according to the Indian time zone.
Related: Twitter Guide
You’re pretty organized in your real life but your computer desktop is a complete mess of files because you have the habit of saving everything on your desktop first.
The pictures that you transferred from the digital camera, your email attachments, documents, program installers, etc. are just scattered on your desktop and you rarely get the time to organize them into relevant folders.
How to Keep your Desktop Tidy
Would you therefore like to have some sort of a “wand” that can bring order to your desktop without much effort? Enter DropIt, a free Windows only utility that can automatically sort and organize your files based on your own rules.
DropIt adds a tiny “drop” icon to your desktop and any files or folders that you drag to this icon are automatically sent to the right folder according to pre-defined rules. And you don’t have to be a geek to create such rules.
For instance, you may set up a simple rule saying that all the PDFs and Word documents (*.doc;*.docx;*.pdf) should go to the My Documents folder while the MP3s and Videos (*.mp3;*.mp4;*.wmv) be moved to the Media folder.
DropIt is handy not just for tidying up your desktop but for organizing files in any of the other folders on your hard drive. It can both move as well as copy files from one folder to another or you may set the transfer mode as ‘compressed’ in which case the files will be zipped before getting moved to the destination.
You can even combine DropIt with the very powerful desktop search in Windows to organize files on your computer. For instance, find all the PDFs with desktop search and dump them to an appropriate folder by dragging them all to DropIt.
Once you have a tidy desktop, get this wallpaper to organize the remaining application icons in an easy-to-find layout. Also, if you are only looking to organize your desktop files into logical groups but without moving them to other folders, check out the Fences utility.
May Allen, community manager at SlideRocket, has created an interesting deck that highlights some of the most dramatic and talked-about presentations of the past decade.
The list includes a video animation explaining Credit Crisis, Al Gore’s presentation on climate change, Steve Jobs unveiling the Macbook Air and the Girl Effect, among others. It did however miss Randy Pausch's Last Lecture which has been more than 13m times on YouTube. [via]
Also see: The World’s Best Presentations
Designers, for both web and print media, mostly use tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for doing the creatives of a project. They'll do the prototypes in PSD format but, for approval, the designs are delivered as PDFs since their clients may not have the software (Photoshop in this case) that is required to view PSD files.
Read Photoshop (PSD), Fonts (TTF) and other files in the browser.
That said, if you have any Photoshop (PSD) files on your desktop that you want to view but without having to install Photoshop, here’s a tip for you – just go to your Google Docs account and upload the file.
Google has recently added support for new file formats in Google Docs that are commonly used to exchange design prototypes between clients and designers. That mean you can open and quickly read Photoshop and other ?files in the browser itself without requiring the application.
The file formats that can be natively viewed inside Google Docs, without conversion, include Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (AI), Fonts (TTF), AutoCAD drawings (DXF) and Office 2010 documents (like DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).
And if the file that you are trying to open is already on the web, you don’t even have to bother uploading it to your Google Docs account. Copy the ?public URL of that file and pass it to Google's online viewer at docs.google.com/viewer.
Also read: Google Docs Guide [Do Everything with Google Docs]
The video player of YouTube supports quite a few keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly skip forward or backward in a video.
For instance, while a video is playing, you can press the ‘0’ key to move the play head to the beginning of a video. Press the left or right arrow keys will let you go back or forward in a video by 10%. Alternatively, you may use number keys to jump to specific sections of a video – the key ‘1’ will move you to the 10% mark, ‘2’ to the 20% mark and so on.
Other than supporting shortcuts, the YouTube player now also lets you alter the playback speed of a video so that you may fast-forward, or slow-down, the video with a click (screenshot).
You may increase the video playback speed by 2x (a 4 minute video will play back in two minutes) or slow it down by a factor of .25 so that the same 4 minute clip takes 16 minutes to play back. Increase the play speed if the video presentation is boring or decrease when you are transcribing what’s being said in the video.
This new option is still being rolled out and may not be available across all YouTube videos.
Also see: Change Playback Speed in QuickTime
Adobe today released the final version of Flash Player 10.2 that contains several bug fixes and some new features.
First, the Flash Player now supports full screen mode even when you are working with multiple monitors.? That means you can watch a video in full screen on one display and continue working on your Word document on the other screen.
The other big enhancement is support for Stage Video which, in simple English, means that the Flash Player can now playback HD video while using less CPU resources. Google is already working to support Stage Video playbacks on YouTube.com and once that’s live, you should be able to play those 1080p videos without affecting system performance.
You can grab the new Flash Player from adobe.com – it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Also see the release notes page for a complete list of fixes that have gone into Flash Player 10.2.
If you have trouble installing Flash Player 10.2, you may try uninstalling the previous version before installing the new release.
A sample HD clip (after you hit play, set resolution to 1080p)
While searching for the contact information of an old friend on Google, I came across a public records website that claimed to have the full dossier of him including his phone number and postal address. It was a paid site, the fee was very reasonable and anyone with a credit card could request access to that record.
This got me excited but there was a small problem though. Since this site required my credit card details and it was my first transaction with them, I decided to Google them to confirm if it was a legitimate service or any sort of a scam.
The results suggested that, somewhere hidden in the fine print, the company had a policy where they could automatically charge your credit credit card every month if you are subscribed to some particular services.
I had two options – either spend the whole night reading their 100-page service agreement to ensure that I don’t get charged extra for services that I didn’t use or skip them and try another service.
As I was not too keen to miss this opportunity of regaining contact with a long lost friend, I tried something else – I created a new virtual credit card and set the maximum limit of that card equal to the amount that I was initially asked to pay for access to that record.
I made the transaction using this new credit card and the site immediately granted me access to all the information I was looking for. And, to my surprise, it was quite accurate.
Hours later, after the transaction appeared in my bank statement, I deactivated that virtual credit card and also cancelled my account with the ‘public records’ company. Everything went smoothly and I no longer have to worry about getting charged later.
Arianna Huffington recently sold her popular news website The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million and estimates suggest that the deal will make Ms. Huffington richer by as much as $100 million.
The Huffington Post has an army of few thousand bloggers who contribute on everything from politics to entertainment to tech and a majority of these contributors, if not all, aren’t paid a dime for their work. They get fame but no monetary rewards.
Now some of these Huffington Post contributors are demanding a share of the pie. They’ve setup a Facebook Page, appropriately titled Hey Arianna, asking Arianna to “give a little back to the unpaid writers who built the Huffington Post.”
This $315 million buyout by AOL, along with her $4 million annual salary as part of the deal, was built on the backs of hard-working writers who never saw a dime for their labor.
Many of Huffington Post's most productive contributors broke news and provided astute analysis to regular beats, allowing Huffington to avoid hiring a paid journalist for the same coverage.
The celebrities who contribute to The Huffington Post will continue writing as they aren’t doing it for money anyway. However, the unpaid army of bloggers that painstakingly creates those photo galleries and other search optimized content that brings in millions of visitors to the Post have every reason to feel unhappy at the current “work for free” arrangement.
Thanks Pragati Verma for the tip.
Dropbox offers 2 GB of free online storage space that you can easily bump up to 3 GB or more with the help of your social networks and by inviting friends who aren't on Dropbox yet.
This kind of space is not sufficient to backup the entire hard drive1 but enough to save your essential files and folder that you can’t afford to lose. These may include your documents, photographs, source code and other important files.
Backup with Dropbox is effortless but one big limitation is that your files and folders need to be residing inside the main Dropbox folder before they can be sent to the cloud.
To deal with this problem, we’ll make use of Microsoft SyncToy, a free application that keeps files and folders in sync with each other. You identify all the essential folders that you want to backup and then sync them all with the local Dropbox folder using SyncToy.
Next we’ll use the built-in Task Scheduler in Windows to run SyncToy once per day (or sooner) so that the content of our local Dropbox folder and the source folders are always in sync with each other.
Now that you have the basic idea, lets see how this can be implemented in in few easy steps (you can also skip straight to the video tutorial).
Step 1. Launch SyncToy and create a new folder pair. For instance, to backup documents, set the “Left Folder” as your My Documents folder and the “Right Folder” as a sub-folder of Dropbox. Set the action as ‘synchronize.’
Step 2. Repeat Step 1 for every folder that you want to back up using Dropbox. If you want to backup all your pictures, just point the left folder to the main ‘My Pictures’ folder or choose individual folders if you don’t have space to backup the entire archive.
Step 3. Enter taskschd.msc in the Windows Run box to start the Task Scheduler or go to Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Scheduled Tasks.
Step 4. While you are inside Task Scheduler, create a basic task and give it a name like ‘Dropbox Backup.’ Set the trigger as Daily (run backup once per day) and choose a time when you are less likely to use your workstation.
Step 5. Under Action, choose “Start a Program” and set the program name as SyncToyCmd.exe. For arguments, just say “-R” without quotes and save the task.
That’s it! SyncToy will launch everyday at the set time and will put all the new and updated files into Dropbox. Once there, Dropbox will automatically copy your files to the cloud which you can then access from anywhere from almost any device.
Video Tutorial
Liked it? Check out some Dropbox tips.
[1] Read detailed review of all the popular online backup services if you are looking to backup your full computer and not just few folders.
Most web hosting companies charge you a fixed monthly fee and in return, they offer you a finite amount of storage space for hosting your web pages, images and other files.
It doesn’t really matter if you are hosting a simple website with 10 pages or a comprehensive product catalogue with thousands of pages – the amount you pay for hosting will be the same.
There’s also a limit on the amount of traffic (bandwidth quota) that your site can receive in a month. If you exceed that limit, the hosting provider is likely to suspend your site or you’ll be asked to upgrade to a different plan. On the other side, if your site receives only minimal traffic, you’ll still have to pay for the full bandwidth.
Unlike web hosting companies, Amazon S3 follows a ‘pay for what you use’ model where you only have to pay for the exact amount of storage and bandwidth that your website is consuming in a month.
There’s another advantage - the Amazon S3 SLA guarantees a monthly uptime of at least 99.9% which, I doubt, is offered by any of the traditional web hosting companies.
And thanks to some recent enhancements, hosting your website on Amazon S3 is almost as easy as uploading your files to an FTP server. The only limitation is that Amazon S3 can only be used for hosting HTML websites and not dynamic sites like WordPress blogs.
Step 1: Assuming that you already an Amazon.com account, log in to your Amazon S3 console. You may also use desktop-based S3 clients but to keep things simple, we’ll use the web client in this tutorial.
Step 2: Create a bucket here and give it a name which is the same as your website. For instance, if you are planning to host your website mybeautifulfamily.com with Amazon, create an S3 bucket with same name.
Step 3: Select the new bucket and click the Upload button to upload all the web pages, images, CSS and other static files from your desktop to your Amazon S3 bucket. Click ‘Set Permissions,’ select ‘Make Everything Public’ and start the upload process.
Step 4: Now that your files have been uploaded, right-click the bucket name and choose Properties. Switch to the Websites tab, enable the websites feature and set your index.html file as the index document. Save the changes.
That’s it. Here's a recap of all the above steps in the form of a video screencast:
Map Amazon S3 to your own Web Domain
There’s one last step. Your website is now hosted on Amazon S3 but it has a confusing web address (aka Endpoint) which looks something like this:
mybeautifulfamily.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.comSince we want people to find our site at mybeautifulfamily.com and not through the above address, we need to map the Amazon bucket address to our sweet web domain.
That’s also simple – log in to your domain hosting service and create a new CNAME Record for your domain. Set the value of this CNAME record as the Endpoint provided by Amazon S3 and save your changes. The DNS changes might take a while to propagate across the web and once that happens, your new site can be accessed from anywhere.
The Cost of Hosting Websites with Amazon S3
According to some rough calculations, if you have a 20-page website that takes about 10 MB of storage space and your site gets 200 visitors per day, the monthly hosting bill with Amazon S3 should be around $5 per month.
Not exactly cheap but the site’s uptime will be close to 100% and it won’t crash even if you make it to the front page of CNN.com.
Also see: How to Lower your Amazon S3 Bill
This pyramid chart represents the basic needs of geeks and things that often give them a high. This includes speaking at a TED conference and writing a book for O’Reilly.
Agree? Illustration courtesy @loulouk [via O’Reilly].
Millions of Indians woke up to a pleasant surprise this morning.
The Times of India, which has the largest number of print subscribers among all English newspapers in the world, carried a full page cartoon on their front page illustrating “a day in the life of India.”
If you aren’t a Times subscriber or haven’t see this cartoon yet, here’s a PDF version.
This is part of a campaign for day.in, IndiaTimes’ latest project where people of any age can post original photos and videos around anything that depict "life in India."
The overcrowded local trains of Mumbai, our beautiful monuments, the wedding processions, the joy of living in joint families, the Bollywood posters and anything that captures the 'asli' India.
The reactions to this TOI cartoon, a work of Neelabh Banerjee, have been mixed so far.
Some people say its offensive, the campaign asks the audience to “celebrate the chaotic, quirky circus called India” - while a big majority, myself included, found the illustration as creative and funny. What do you think?
A Day in the Life of India[*] Except for a similar name, TOI’s “A Day in the Life of India” project possibly has no connection with YouTube’s “Life in a Day” project though both revolve around user generated content.
The standard lock screen of most touchscreen based mobile phones have a slider that you have to move in one particular direction to unlock the phone. Some phones require you to draw an unlock pattern every time you wake up the device from sleep mode.
Nokia is experimenting with a slightly different kind of lock screen for their Symbian^3 phones that will help you do things a bit faster. See demo:
Nokia’s new lock screen, called Bubbles, features shortcuts to apps trapped inside bubbles which bounce around your phone’s screen . These bubbles could be shortcuts to your phone’s call log, to the FM radio, the music player or your text messages.
To unlock the phone, you simply have to grab the right bubble and drag it to a drop point to launch the corresponding app. Missed calls and new text message have their own bubbles.
Visit Nokia Labs to download a copy of Bubbles for your Nokia phone.