September 2008

Molecules 1.2 submitted for review

in
September 21, 2008
Molecules icon

I just submitted Molecules 1.2 for review in the App Store. Sorry it's taken me so long to get a new version out to you, but this version required a complete rewrite of a portion of the core code. I also have been distracted by a few things at my day job and some shiny new technology that I've been playing with.

Read on for more information on this release.

Running a Drupal website on Amazon EC2

in
September 13, 2008
Amazon Web Services

As I described in my previous post, this website is currently running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The underlying architecture of the site is based on the Drupal content management system, something that I've also described previously. I was not completely happy with the performance of my previous host (Media Temple), and Amazon EC2 promises to give you the ability to host a virtual machine running whatever you want within Amazon's data centers. You get access to the bandwidth and processing power of a huge online business, but you only pay for what you use.

In my limited testing so far, EC2 flies as a web host and appears to be able to scale for traffic spikes. It also provides a number of unique features, such as incremental snapshots of your data that are stored on S3 and the capability of creating throwaway clones of your server for doing development and testing.

Read on for a step-by-step guide to configuring a Drupal website like this one on the Elastic Compute Cloud.

Welcome from the Cloud

in
September 7, 2008
Amazon Web Services

You might notice that this site is running a little faster. This is because I have decided to try out hosting my site from within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is part of Amazon's Web Services, which also include the popular Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and Simple Queue Service. Briefly, Amazon has decided to open up the computing capabilities and bandwidth of its data centers to the world, and has been steadily adding services and features over the last couple of years. A couple of weeks ago, they added a feature to their EC2 service that made it practical to run a web site from their cloud.

Read on for more.