I have just installed and configured this great Amazon S3 content management module for a site with 15K+ visits per day.

The great work done by the developer was definitely worth the contribution made, and it was easy enough to understand and improve upon.

So I did… I have a development build of the module available that includes support for a CloudFront URL if applicable, allowing use of the full suite of Amazon’s CDN for content delivery around the work. The site I installed it on has readers everywhere and this is a good chance to have a look at what’s possible with Amazon S3 and CloudFront, and how it can be integrated with WordPress.

If anyone has ideas on further extending the module, let me know… the current list of improvements I am thinking about making, possibly in conjunction with the original developer (who I am still waiting to hear back from) include detection of available S3 buckets, template elements as well as post media, and possibly some integration with or extension to provide support for a WP-Super-Cache -style static template elements like JS and CSS to be delivered by the Amazon CDN as well.

Post a comment if you have any ideas!

WordPress 3.0.1 is out for download and automatic installation.

I have already upgraded this site and am working through my customers’ sites as time allows.

This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

If you ever need assistance installing or upgrading WordPress, feel free to contact AANDCP IT Solutions!

Check out this reference page on the Google Apps help site:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892

WordPress 3.0 is out and available for download. You can check it out here.

I have installed it from scratch for one project and I have installed the upgrade using the built-in upgrade tools. Both have been very successful.

The new interface improvements are great and it seems very stable. All of my existing templates and plug-ins worked without a a hitch. The only issue I had was with the widgets associated with my templates. I just had to re-add them.

Great work from Matt and the team at WordPress.com and Automattic!

So I have finally gotten around to setting up an Amazon CloudFront solution for a hosting customer.

Set up an Amazon S3 bucket, upload some content to it (in this case, some .flv files for a film promotion site) and then sign into the AWS console and set up a CloudFront distribution point, selecting the bucket full of content as the source.

You optionally even set up your own CNAMEs to have personalized URLs. Finish setting up the distribution point and get the CloudFront URL and then just create a CNAME entry in your DNS settings for your hosting/DNS.

Wait a few minutes for the CloudFront status to update to “Deployed”.

Once that has happened, update the URLs in your main content site and hey presto… cloud delivery of your content!

My experiences this afternoon have been very positive – the speed is great for the little site I have set up and I think somewhat Digg/Slashdot and national TV exposure proof!

Feel free to comment on your CDN experiences.

After having spent an hour or two trying to find the right answer, I found the easiest and most beautiful solution as the following :

1. Follow Google’s instructions to setup your main account using Exchange protocol.
2. On your iPhone or iPad, launch Safari and go to m.google.com/sync – don’t forget to choose English (US) language, it doesn’t work in other languages.
3. Authenticate and the select the delegates you want to add to your iPhone’s calendar.
4. Keep in mind that the calendar’s colour will be choosed automatically in the following order : red, orange, blue, green, purple. Add them one at a time if you want to choose the colour order.

Feel free to post in the comments if you have any other suggestions.

Well… I couldn’t resist and was pleasantly surprised to find that our local Apple reseller had more than enough stock for everyone to go around (before 9:00am at least!)

It is very good.

All the built-in apps are very fast on both WiFi and using Telstra’s iPad 3G coverage.

Watching movies is easy and I think will fit right into my lifestyle just fine.

The larger keyboard is big enough that you can just about touch type on it if you remember that not all the keys are where your fingers remember them to be, and you can’t rest your fingers on the home keys (thanks Mrs Nathan!)

All in all – a great piece of kit by Apple and something that I can see having more and more practical use in both businesses and homes, not just as the next cool toy Apple developed, but as a “changer”.

I might get around to posting some more as I get more familiar with it and work out some of the more fun ins and outs.

The Preview.app in 10.5 and newer has many new features. One that appears to be undocumented, however, is the creation (merging) of multi-page PDF documents. It’s simple:

Use Preview to open up the two PDFs you would like to merge. Choose View » Show Sidebar (or click the Sidebar button). Make sure both PDFs are visible on the screen at the same time. When the Sidebar pops out, you will see a graphical representation of the pages in your PDF document. Simply drag the page, or pages (use Comand to select multiple pages) from the Sidebar of one PDF to the Sidebar of another. You have now merged pages from two separate PDF documents.

Two related hints:
You can use the proxy icon in the PDF window’s title bar if you want to copy one entire PDF to another PDF. Just drag the proxy from the title bar of one PDF to the Sidebar of another.

You can copy some types of files directly from the Finder to a new PDF using Preview’s New From Clipboard (Command-N) feature. Go to the Finder, select an image file such as JPEG, and copy it (Command-C). Now go to Preview and do Command-N. Your JPEG file will show up as a new PDF document. This seems to work for many graphic types, even the Adobe PSD Photoshop format.

Credit for this very useful tip goes to MacOSXHints.com

When using SlideDeck with WordPress, you might find that you can’t get the SlideDeck to correctly insert as per the instructions.

The hint: make sure you are using the Visual Editor in WordPress, not the static HTML editor.

One of my hosting customers spent half the weekend with various browsers, version and test SlideDecks in his new WordPress blog, and yet everytime it was working for me!

Turns out he had selected “Disable the visual editor when writing” in the User options for his account.

If you select the Visual Editor, and then attempt to insert the SlideDeck, there is goodness everywhere!

When importing into WordPress, the importer doesn’t seem to like accents and umlauts.

One of my hosting customers is now going through the entries now and finding that where there is a word with an accent or umlaut in it (e.g. the first “a” in Trollhättan), the importer will stop at that letter and does not import the rest of the post.

Thankfully, he didn’t write the full Swedish version of words that often.

Fun and games!

If you are using the latest release of the eDegree° WordPress theme and you can’t get the Featured Content Gallery to work on the front page, welcome to my world!

After a lot of searching, I finally found the solution here.

The secret is to comment-out the second line of the wp-content/themes/edegree/js/functions.js.

One of my customers recently complained of having to go out to the receptionist’s computer and type in an administrator password everytime her local USB printer ran out of paper or got a paper jam.

I think I have a fix:

Create a new group in Workgroup Manager on the server.
Add the user to the new group.
Follow these instructions on the local computer with the USB printer attached:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3511

Has worked a treat – the user can pause and resume the printer without any issues.

I was patching a RedHat server that managed to get itself all confused when it was installing patches.

I was able to stop the “yum update” process and restart it from where it virtually left off with following:

“yum clean all”
“yum update”

When you run the “yum update” command, you will likely get some package conflicts. Just use the command below to remove the offending packages and then Yum can reinstall them for you!

“rpm -e –justdb –nodeps packagename”

Once you have Rails up and going on Mac OS X Server, you can add useful plugins to extend the functionality and perform some useful tasks.

One such solution would be to integrate with Campaign Monitor so you can subscribe new users/members/shoppers to lists within Campaign Monitor for later mail-outs.

Start by adding some extra required gems to your server:
sudo gem install soap4r

Then, install the very useful Campaigning module:
sudo gem install gnumarcelo-campaigning -s http://gems.github.com

Once you have done this, integration is easy. I will be adding to this article with the source of one of my projects shortly!

http://www.icoretech.org/2009/11/installing-mysql-ruby-gem-in-snow-leopard-server/