My last WordPress update to 3.2 couldn’t happen on one of our older shared servers, as it was running earlier versions of PHP and MySQL. I forget which was the culprit, but it meant I wasn’t getting the new lovely interface and other enhancements. I also run about 7–8 personal projects and friends sites off our company servers, which while they’re not big hitters or bandwidth guzzlers, I have been known to take the server offline while “trying something out”.

Therefore I decided to look at finally getting my very own hosting. Can you believe it? 15 years of making websites and I’ve never had my own hosting! I know a few friends use WebFaction, Melbourne Server Hosting and RackSpace, but I wasn’t convinced I’d need anything too big, or expensive. I run a few blogs, we keep all media on services like YouTube and Vimeo and average page impressions hover in the 30-100 a day per site, with exceptions for houseofninja.com and speaknspell.co.uk.

With this in mind, and already having an Amazon AWS S3 account, I did a bit of googlin’ about Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting. We’ve all heard the phrase “cloud computing”, even my mum has, and it is very much the buzz at the moment. In brief, it’s about providing resizable, scalable, cheap on-demand computing. In my case, about letting me set up a server that operates on an “as used” basis, upping it’s processing power when called upon, pumping out bandwidth when hammered, and I only pay for those occasions.

At the moment on EC2, you can start a micro instance server, and not pay a penny for 12 months in terms of monthly fees. The first 1GB of transfer in and out is also free. Potentially, I get a years worth of hosting for nothing… and even without the free tier, it was working out to $1.08 for the month with 1GB in/out and an elastic IP. Yes, you read that right. one. dollar. eight. cents.

I tried a few instances out, one a Ubuntu instance with WordPress pre-installed, and was going to run one instance for each site… but thought better of that. One micro instance should be able to handle a bunch of sites. Time for more googlin’.

I ended up following this excellent tutorial from Caleb Ogden. Aimed at a mac user, clear, concise, I was up and running in about 30 minutes. There is little point in me re-dressing this for my step-through, just follow it. I have used Ubuntu/Linux a little, and am not afraid of the Terminal, but if you can follow instructions, you shouldn’t have any problems with the tutorial.

When done, you can then follow his walkthrough for configuring Virtual Hosts, so your instance can run multiple sites.

I will add that he doesn’t explain how you get Transmit/Filezilla/Expandrive working with your EC2 instance, due to sftp needing the .pem certificate. This quick reference allowed me in with my usual mac gui tools.

A quick config of my domain’s DNS and boom, this site is now hosted in the cloud.

Notes:

One thing to note, is that if you intend to let WordPress resize images to your defined media settings, you need to install the GD lib, like so;

# yum install php-gd

Then restart the httpd service.

Oh, and you’ll also need to edit the httpd.conf file (in /etc/httpd/conf) to allow the mod_rewrite rules for permalinks to work. Open the httpd.conf file in Vi, and look for this;

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
    AllowOverride None

Change None to All, then restart the httpd service again.

If you update to Lion OSX 10.7, you may not be able to connect with Transmit/Expandrive, so you’ll need to add the certicficate again…

ssh-add [yourkey].pem

You may have read about my frustrations about the current HTML5 <video> implementation, it’s short-comings and general deflating-balloon sad-trombone-ness.

Enter JW Player, and their HTML5 beta.

The JW Player for HTML5 is a fully skinnable and configurable player based on the new <video> tag found in HTML5. It is built using javascript (jQuery) and enables a seamless fallback to the popular JW Player for Flash. Currently, our HTML5 player is in Beta. Certain functionalities that we consider essential are missing in this Beta version and will be included in the 1.0 release, which we anticipate to be this summer. We encourage you to provide us with feedback on this beta version so that we may incorporate it into the 1.0 release. If you are a developer interested in learning more, please visit the Developer Site.

So I’m pretty damn excited to see this, because as one of their working examples, they show an example with just an MP4 file. Just a single MP4 file! It’s like they read my whinge!

We’re already using the JW Player on the D&AD site, but not at version 5 yet. However, for the coming revisions, we’ll be updating and serving MP4 video to iPads, iPhones and iPods via JW Player for HTML5 in the near future (providing the geeks are happy with everything where they’re concerned!) The JW Player uses the same skins from the Flash Player with the HTML5 player, meaning continuity without bloodshed. Nice.

Colour me happy.

I have this theory about the real amount of people on the internet.

Every online service I sign up for, the same people are on there. Oh, hi LuxuryLuke, leandaryan, lloydi, philsherry… I must have the same 20-30 people on 20-30 social networking sites.

Now I have a theory about this. There is only actually about 300 people online on the internet. They are your circle of friends, incidental characters and innocent by-standers whom you flame.

Everyone else, every username you see, every blog you read, every email from someone you don’t know, is what’s known as a non-playable character (NPC) in video gaming jargon… think about it. I bet you’ve not got more than 60-80 people on any number of networking sites (excluding Facebook!) that you actually really know and have probably met, and they’re the same people aren’t they?

Prove me wrong…

More proof in part II

There’s a neat bit of software that you can use in conjunction with your GPS unit and Google Earth to show your position in realtime while Stumblin’.

Using gps2geX, the software generates an “on the fly” KML file which is loaded in Google Earth. The co-ordinates for gps2geX are updated from the gpsdX daemon, which is also being used by KisMac, so no one app is taking sole control of the GPS unit.

The results are pretty cool. You can see your exact position on Google Earth, updated as per your settings in gps2geX, Google Earth even tilts and pans the camera around based on what direction and speed you’re moving in.

So if you’re driving around looking for wireless networks, how are you streaming images in Google Earth? Ahh, good question. I use my Sony Ericcson K800i as a bluetooth modem. I’m on T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Plus service plan, an unlimited (yeah, with the usual cavaets) internet access plan. A drive around my home town worked well, probably because I had a lot of imagery cached already, but it all seemed to work just fine.