Tom’s Graphic Design Journal

Lots! Aside from my full-time job, I just wanted to plug a shameless link. Cloud-9ine uses my media blog for a face so I can keep notes about my discoveries with Amazon's web services EC2 and S3. Course it's my blog so whatevs At any rate...and more importantly, I wanted to let anyone looking at my blog (and anyone interested) know that I'm working on making my media blog / cms infinitely scalable.

It has some refinements that need to be made. Some bits that could work a little faster and basically more dynamic...for example, adding one or adding ten images at once...Things like that. This is pushing the development really into the next phase of beta which is just polishing things off. I already have working demos, but I want to polish what I have before adding more features. I also want to of course figure out how it'll all work in terms of being deployed.

So how will that deployment work? Well, I still want to offer some sort of version to the world because I've been a leech long enough and I want to give back to the community. We all really need better blogging software anyway. WordPress (used right here folks) and Blogger, etc. are great...but...It's 2008. We have all this new wonderful technology that simply didn't exist when all these blogs and CMS' were built. No fault of anyone...and certainly WordPress is quite good. I won't go into my theories, there's enough of that here and where I think the future is going to take us with web development.

Back to the point. One of the things I envision happening in the whole web industry is a very acute change in how our web sites are hosted. Of course Amazon EC2. That's not the only provider either, there's others like Joyent and many "regular" web hosts that have been offering VPS solutions for a long while. That unique thing about EC2 (and Joyent to some extent, but that's Solaris and I believe more geared for Ruby - bleh) is that you can set the instances up in such a way that you can simply turn on and off more as you need. This is way cool and here's why:

Minervablog will be more of what they are coining the phrase "appliance." Where you will simply be able to turn on as many instances as you need to cover the traffic...But probably automatic. Meaning you will run one instance and as the traffic increases more will automatically turn on. As the traffic spike subsides, the instances will turn off. There will be backups, etc. Also, some nice little features.

Nice features? If instances automatically turning on isn't enough...another feature slated is the ability to "phone in" more support. Meaning, Minervablog will e-mail out to your phone an SMS (e-mail to sms via phone carrier) and alert you to errors. It will also give you the ability to e-mail back (if you can from your phone, cool, else, where ever) to make certain changes. Changes like starting up or turning off an instance, and more...Oh yes, there's more. This is just a taste.

I've been working with sites, and quite specifically, some fairly unstable sites. It's extremely handy to have e-mail alerts. However when you get one, you really can't do anything about it if you're out on the road or somewhere away from a computer. Well you still can't fix major issues, but with some of the features I have figured out, you'll at least be able to "reset", or add/remove power to, your site.

Note: I do quite a bit of research and let me tell you what I'm working on (whether you see it or not) is very big and doesn't exist elsewhere. I know it doesn't because the technology is all too new. Similar solutions (that are probably just as good and some better) do exist, but the cost and availability is the catch. Thanks to new technology, that's changing. Make no mistake...If it's a site that needs a CMS/blog and has a ton of traffic - this IS the solution it needs. Didn't I say it was 2008?

Of course it may be 2009 by the time this all comes together...But I hope not! I hope someone out there is interested, I just may work faster and stay up later each night.

   

Lots! Aside from my full-time job, I just wanted to plug a shameless link. Cloud-9ine uses my media blog for a face so I can keep notes about my discoveries with Amazon's web services EC2 and S3. Course it's my blog so whatevs At any rate...and more importantly, I wanted to let anyone looking at my blog (and anyone interested) know that I'm working on making my media blog / cms infinitely scalable.

It has some refinements that need to be made. Some bits that could work a little faster and basically more dynamic...for example, adding one or adding ten images at once...Things like that. This is pushing the development really into the next phase of beta which is just polishing things off. I already have working demos, but I want to polish what I have before adding more features. I also want to of course figure out how it'll all work in terms of being deployed.

So how will that deployment work? Well, I still want to offer some sort of version to the world because I've been a leech long enough and I want to give back to the community. We all really need better blogging software anyway. WordPress (used right here folks) and Blogger, etc. are great...but...It's 2008. We have all this new wonderful technology that simply didn't exist when all these blogs and CMS' were built. No fault of anyone...and certainly WordPress is quite good. I won't go into my theories, there's enough of that here and where I think the future is going to take us with web development.

Back to the point. One of the things I envision happening in the whole web industry is a very acute change in how our web sites are hosted. Of course Amazon EC2. That's not the only provider either, there's others like Joyent and many "regular" web hosts that have been offering VPS solutions for a long while. That unique thing about EC2 (and Joyent to some extent, but that's Solaris and I believe more geared for Ruby - bleh) is that you can set the instances up in such a way that you can simply turn on and off more as you need. This is way cool and here's why:

Minervablog will be more of what they are coining the phrase "appliance." Where you will simply be able to turn on as many instances as you need to cover the traffic...But probably automatic. Meaning you will run one instance and as the traffic increases more will automatically turn on. As the traffic spike subsides, the instances will turn off. There will be backups, etc. Also, some nice little features.

Nice features? If instances automatically turning on isn't enough...another feature slated is the ability to "phone in" more support. Meaning, Minervablog will e-mail out to your phone an SMS (e-mail to sms via phone carrier) and alert you to errors. It will also give you the ability to e-mail back (if you can from your phone, cool, else, where ever) to make certain changes. Changes like starting up or turning off an instance, and more...Oh yes, there's more. This is just a taste.

I've been working with sites, and quite specifically, some fairly unstable sites. It's extremely handy to have e-mail alerts. However when you get one, you really can't do anything about it if you're out on the road or somewhere away from a computer. Well you still can't fix major issues, but with some of the features I have figured out, you'll at least be able to "reset", or add/remove power to, your site.

Note: I do quite a bit of research and let me tell you what I'm working on (whether you see it or not) is very big and doesn't exist elsewhere. I know it doesn't because the technology is all too new. Similar solutions (that are probably just as good and some better) do exist, but the cost and availability is the catch. Thanks to new technology, that's changing. Make no mistake...If it's a site that needs a CMS/blog and has a ton of traffic - this IS the solution it needs. Didn't I say it was 2008?

Of course it may be 2009 by the time this all comes together...But I hope not! I hope someone out there is interested, I just may work faster and stay up later each night.