Blog | Jeremy Glover

Blog

  • How do you watch your television shows?

    Old TV Set

    Midway through Heroes: Season 3 I realized how quickly video streaming technology has evolved in the last few years. Think about the multitude of ways you can now get your fix.

    EDIT:
    Loren brought to my attention another category which I left off entirely, which is software/hardware combos for consuming the aforementioned services:

    Just 15 years ago that list was a lot smaller: TV, video rental stores, VCR.

    What’s your favorite viewing service?

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  • Use Google As a Crutch For Your Cheap Website Host


    Almost every site I create nowadays relies heavily on JavaScript. Having to load in all those scripts can really bog your web server down. Instead of serving those static files yourself, why not use Google? It provides a free service called Google AJAX Libraries that hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries.

    Google makes this very easy by providing a dead-simple API.

    Here’s a quick example of how to load jQuery 1.3.2:

    <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
    <script>google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");</script>

    If you don’t want to use Google’s loader, they provide a direct link to the script for each library.

    Using this service in parallel with Amazon S3, my Bluehost-hosted site now runs significantly faster at almost no additional cost.

    Check out Google’s available AJAX libraries.

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  • Keep getting kicked off Windows XP after you log in?

    Viruses can be tricky. Even if your anti-virus software is kept up-to-date on a daily basis it may not catch the newest threats. What would you do if a virus infected your computer? That depends. Can you run a virus scan? Can you even login? I ran into that problem and came out victorious.

    (more…)

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  • Speed Up That Cheap Website with Cheap Amazon S3


    Do you have an economy-grade website host? Me too. BlueHost is great for only $6.95 per month but its response times and transfer rates are terrible. Fear not — Amazon S3 to the rescue. For pennies a day you can supplement your cheap website host using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

    Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

    Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

    It is simple. So simple.

    • Sign up for an account.
    • Download and install the awesome S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) Firefox add-on.
    • Upload the files you want to be served up like hotcakes.
    • Update the links in your HTML files to point to the new location.
      Example: http://s3.amazonaws.com/jeremy/blog/images/large_bandwidth_sucking_header.jpg
      Note that the example is intended to show the format of the URL and does not point to a valid resource.

    Too good to be true? Nope. The S3 files are served up lickety split and best of all it takes the load off of your cheap host which allows it to function much more efficiently. So far I have moved my site’s header and the LightBox JS file. Why didn’t I move the other JS files and images? Because Google hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries for free.

    How much does it cost?
    Very little, unless your site becomes wildly popular. 1 million requests costs one dollar plus 17 cents per GB transfered. That’s right. 1,000,000 GET requests = $1.00 + $0.17/GB.

    Let’s assume the average size of the elements being served from your Amazon S3 bucket is 10KB.
    10KB = 0.01MB = 0.00001GB
    1,000,000 requests x 0.00001GB = 10GB
    10GB x $0.17/GB = $1.70
    1,000,000 requests x $0.01/10,000 requests = $1.00
    Total Download Cost: $2.70

    Your cheap site can now support 1,000,000 requests per month for a whopping $9.65 ($6.95 for BlueHost and $2.70 for Amazon S3). And if your site gets Dugg or on the front page of Reddit, Amazon S3 will scale without sweating a drop.

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  • Why I Use 10MinuteMail.com

    Unfortunately, many websites that collect email addresses do so without your best wishes in mind. Case and point: I decided to help meetup.com this evening by clicking on one of their sponsored ads. Because of the way Google AdWords/AdSense works, the ad hoster may not get any revenue unless the user takes a certain action on the advertiser’s site. The call to action on the landing page consisted of a form with fields for name and email address which one would submit in order to receive a free ebook.

    Anytime you have to fill out a form with your email to get something “free”, alarms should go off in your head. They do in mine! And in this instance I’m so thankful for a free little service called 10 Minute Mail. Take a look at the picture below and you’ll immediately see why.

    10 Minute Mail Spam

    In two minutes I received three emails. I could maybe see why I would get two emails: one as a welcome and another with my free ebook. But why the 3rd? And if they did things right, why the 2nd? Why not just make the “free” ebook link in the welcome email be the activation link? I don’t get it.

    A beautiful thing happened only minutes later. My email address self-destructed. Ahhhh the bliss! Never again do I have to worry about receiving spam from that awful company. Thank you, 10 Minute Mail!

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