Blog on Photoblogs

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was planning on using Amazon S3 with my photoblog. Well I am happy to let you all know that I have finally managed to get everything switched over and it’s not hard at all. I had a couple of goals in mind when I decided to host my photoblog images on S3. Just to recap, here they are:

Determine the cost
The biggest question is, how much is it going to cost? Most of our photoblogs don’t make us any money (although that would be really nice) so we need to keep the costs under control. I will start publishing how much it costs me so everyone can get an idea.

A simple backup plan
Sure I have a plan, but it mostly involves an external USB drive, which never leaves my desk – I know! So using S3 makes sense as a solution for not only serving my images, but backing them up as well.

How I did it
Step 1. Get an Amazon S3 account
Super simple stuff here. Goto Amazon Web Services and sign up for Amazon S3.

Step 2. Get some software
I consider myself to be very technical, after all being technical is what pays my bills, so I decided to use some open-source software to interact with Amazon’s S3 service so I downloaded Cockpit. Let me just say that I very quickly changed my mind, since I would much rather be spending my time on my photography or working on my sites! I spent $20 on Jungle Disk and was instantly impressed at how simple interacting with S3 truly was.

Step 3. Move my images from my web server to S3
You’re going to need a “bucket” to store your files, and Jungle Disk makes this super simple. First, right click on the Jungle Disk application icon in your systems tray and then click “configure”. Click on “add bucket” and follow the wizard to create your first storage bucket.
Once you have your storage bucket created you’re going to have to move all your image files from your web host to your new Amazon S3 account. I used Filezilla for this and just moved everything to my laptop and then copied it all to my “network drive”. It’s that easy.

NOTE: Massive insane gotcha! For whatever reason, Jungle Disk does not support the ability to give access rights on your files to anyone other than you! Not exactly sure why they decided to do this. But check out S3 for Firefox - it’s the right price - free! and does exactly what we need. I will update with S3 for Firefox soon.  So to answer the obvious question - do I still feel that Jungle Disk is so great?  Yes, it’s a great application, but it doesn’t fit as well as I had originally hoped.

Step 4. Making your S3 bucket accessible via HTTP
I am not going to try to explain this, but Amazon has an excellent how-to article on Amazon S3 and CNAME’s so I strongly suggest that you check it out and follow the instructions on adding a CNAME to your DNS configuration.

Step 5. Update your photoblog
I am using Pixelpost so I needed to make a change to my image_template.html file, pretty simple stuff. Here’s what it looks like now.

<img class="center" src="http://images.behindthelens.ca/<IMAGE_NAME>" alt="<IMAGE_TITLE>" title="<IMAGE_TITLE>" width="<IMAGE_WIDTH>" height="<IMAGE_HEIGHT>" />

That’s it you’re done!

If you try this out with your photoblog, let us all know how it went by leaving a comment. Also, if someone tries this on something other than Pixelpost be sure to let us all know how it goes!

On an unrelated to photography and photoblogs note, if you’re a keener and want to learn all you can about Cloud computing, make sure that you check out the ESM blog.

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