Please Take our Poll: Who’s Buying an iPhone or iPad Before AT&T’s New Rate Plan Kicks In? http://wp.me/p4P8c-wme from @gigaom
Perhaps the most polarizing news in these parts of late is around AT&T’s new smartphone data plan changes, which the carrier unveiled yesterday. Some customers are happy that they’ll be saving up to $15 a month with reduced plan pricing, while others aren’t thrilled to hear that unlimited data is going away in favor of 200 MB or 2 GB buckets with overage charges. Those in the latter camp might appreciate the facetious tweet of Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC: “Look on the bright side AT&T customers, your data is STILL unlimited, it’s your bill that was uncapped.”
But the new rate plans don’t take effect until June 7, so there’s still a wee bit of time for new customers to nab an iPhone or iPad under the current unlimited plan offerings. Considering the expectation of a possible front-facing video camera that’s sure to gobble up data on AT&T’s network, it just might make sense to buy a current iPhone 3GS to gain the unlimited data contract and hope you can return the old model for a new one next week. The newest iPhone hardware is widely expected to launch at Apple’s WWDC event next Monday, the same day the new AT&T tiered pricing plans kick in.
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Meanwhile iPad owners, which watch three times more video on their Apple device than on others, seem the most miffed, and with good reason. Apple announced an innovative, unlimited AT&T data plan specific to the iPad when it introduced the device in January, which goes by the wayside with this new data plan.
So who’s buying an iPhone or iPad between now and Monday?
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):
Will Metered Mobile Data Slow the App Markets Growth?
What I Do http://bit.ly/9cHdia
Interestingly, a lot of people said this about their displeasure at my new logo: “it doesn’t explain what you do.” I really appreciate that mindset, but then again, Starbucks doesn’t sell mermaid princesses. In 50 stunning examples of great redesigns, there are some logos that absolutely explain everything, and several that don’t. So, that’s a choice.
But the question of “what I do” really stopped me, because I think that if I asked you to answer in 1 line what I do, you’d answer differently. There’d be some consensus eventually, but here’s the thing: there’s what I know I do, and what the masses might think I do, and there’s whatever’s in the middle.
What do I do?
Let’s start with the easy part. What I do is split into a few buckets right now:
In my marketing consulting, I work with big companies.
In my media work, I tell stories about human business on [chrisbrogan.com] and other stuff elsewhere, like Third Tribe.
In my education work, I’m going to help people achieve escape velocity.
I’m a business consultant, a writer, an educator, a professional speaker, a marketer.
I’m here to help people build human business, both at the individual and at the super-huge-company scale.
I am not a social media guru. I am not a Twitter star. I am not here to help people build better websites.
B is the letter after A. It’s not a Type-A personality. It’s Type-B. It’s B-sides. It’s B-line. Whatever. It’s the letter B. That’s also the first letter of my last name. But hey, it can be abstracted.
B.
We’ll all see. But what I learned, and what I like, is that this whole thing, throwing up a new logo, is a reminder that people see you as you have been, as they understand you to be, and as you’ve let them remember you.
Ah, branding. Ah, marketing. I learn every day.
This cinema spot from UNICEF in Belgium dramatically makes the point that unsafe water kills lots of kids around the world every day. The spot shows one child wrestling with a river, but despite the fantastical premise, the life-and-death struggle never seems cartoonish. The quiet piano soundtrack provides a disturbing counterpoint to the violence, which becomes more harrowing as no one in the spot notices what's going on. They calmly continue filling their buckets. Any one of them could be the next to wind up floating in the shallows, killed by the very thing that's supposed to give them life. Via Osocio.
—Posted by David Gianatasio
KFC is urging customers to buy "pink buckets" to help fight breast cancer. The only problem is you could buy a dozen KFC buckets and it wouldn't put a dime towards breast cancer research, reports The Washington Post. The fine print on KFC's "buckets for the cure" website speaks for itself:
“KFC restaurant operators have contributed 50 cents to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure for each Komen branded bucket purchased by the operators from April 5, 2010-May 9, 2010 .Customer purchases of KFC buckets during the promotion will not directly increase the total contribution.”Basically, when the KFC franchises buy their official pink buckets from the KFC supplier, they have to pay $.50 extra per bucket and that goes towards Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation. The only way to move the needle is if enough customers buy enough pink buckets so that the store has to order more.
Or, you could make a healthy meal at home and use the money you saved on eating out to make a direct donation to a cancer charity. Use a service like Charity Navigator to make sure you pick a good one.
Is that right? Buying KFC buckets fights breast cancer? [Washington Post]
"KFC is urging customers to buy "pink buckets" to help fight breast cancer. However, you could buy a dozen KFC buckets and it wouldn't put an extra dime towards breast cancer research, reports The Washington Post. The fine print on KFC's "buckets for the cure" website speaks for itself:"
- rowlikeagirlthat stinks
- VAL D. Zone is not goingIt's not a great way to promote health, in any case.
- John (a.k.a. dendroica)I like pink. I like fried chicken. But actually the extra fat isn't that great to have all the time and helps contribute to the problem along with chem retention in the fat layers including the breast. I feel the same way about pink buckets as I do about pink Barnum animal crackers: the color's all wrong. Just as KFC is red so is the Circus cracker cage. Just donate the bucks in a clean way and forget the campaign.
- Melanie ReedI haven't eaten KFC since I saw the videos on the Internet of how they treat their chickens.
- Gordon Herd
Posted by Dr. Pete
We all know that links are good for SEO and good links are even better, but what does a “good” link profile really look like? It’s easy for even an average website to have hundreds of back-links, and sorting through them to get a sense of the overall quality is often more art than science. It’s also easy to get caught up in the outliers. Will 1 great link or 1 spammy link tip the balance? Probably not, but it’s easy to get distracted by those exceptions when you're filtering through hundreds or thousands of links.
Here on SEOmoz, we've tried to distill (and by "we" I mean a bunch of other people who are smarter than me) the idea of link profile quality into metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority. These are incredibly useful concepts, but now we're on the opposite extreme – just one number to represent something very complex. The problem is, we really don't have much in between, a way to understand the quality of our link profile at a glance.
This blog post really began when I wondered whether it would be possible to take our existing Moz metrics and chart what a link profile looks like. I went through a number of variations (subjecting Ben and Nick to harrowing emails loaded with dozens of graphs), until I finally landed on a process using Open Site Explorer. I'm going to outline that process, give a few examples, and then provide you a link to an Excel spreadsheet to download, so that you can play around with the idea yourself.
The basic process looks something like this:
The result is a distribution of all of your linking domains by the highest-authority pages in those domains. This sounds a lot more complicated than it really is, so let’s see it in action.
Let's start with what a high quality domain might look like – I'll make it easy and pick on SEOmoz. Using the process above, here's one way you might graph the SEOmoz link profile. Since Open Site Explorer exports a maximum of 10,000 links, I've restricted this profile to just the home-page:
You may be surprised to realize that, even for a high-authority site, most of the Page Authority is still on the lower-half of the spectrum. The simple reality is that even on a strong site, most of the actual pages that link to it are much weaker than their parent domains. Most of the back-linked Moz pages land in the second bucket, with a gradual drop-off as PA increases.
Now, let's compare that with a solid but less authoritative site, my own blog. I've got solid back-links from some pretty good sources, but nothing like the Moz does. Here's what my PA profile looks like (this is also the data used in the spreadsheet below):
Here, you see that most of my back-linking pages are sitting in the 0-10 bucket, a clear sign of my inferiority (sniff, sniff), but the curve still levels off gradually and I've got some solid representation up the PA chain.
Finally, let’s pick on a site that came to us in Q&A with some trouble (we’ll keep it anonymous, of course). This isn’t a site that was heinously blackhat, just one that suffered from enough low-quality links that we suspected a problem:
Look closely, and you'll see a pronounced 0-10 bucket followed by a rapid drop-off, with little or no high-quality pages to take up the slack. It may seem like a subtle distinction at first, but look in the PA range of 20-70, and you'll see the difference.
You can download the spreadsheet (1.9 MB) and try it for yourself. Just export your own data from Open Site Explorer (as described above) and paste it into the first worksheet ("OSE Data"). The second sheet ("Domains") will automatically strip out the subdomains, and the third sheet ("Max PA") is a pivot table that calculates the maximum Page Authority for each subdomain and then collapses that into the 10 buckets.
One trick: You'll need to refresh the Pivot Table (how to do this varies a bit with your version of Excel). The other pages and the final graph should refresh themselves automatically. I haven't tested this on a Mac, so feel free to comment with helpful corrections.
This technique is a work in progress, and more of a way to explore your link profile than a hard analytical tactic at this point. If you try this out and find something interesting, please let us know in the comments. We're always looking for useful ways to enhance the data visualizations on the SEOmoz tools.
s3nuke is a single-file Ruby script to delete very large Amazon S3 buckets. It uses multiple threads to retrieve and delete the individual objects in a bucket efficiently regardless of their number. In the use case for which the author wrote it, a bucket containing 260,000 files was deleted in a matter of minutes.
(Link: s3nuke at master – GitHub)
In the shadow of Foursquare Inc., which is fast becoming a start-up darling, the marketing chief of a competing location-based service wondered how hype could help propel his company.
Dan Gilmartin, vice president of marketing for Where Inc., was watching the frenzy building around Foursquare Chief Executive Dennis Crowley as he spoke at a recent tech conference called Where 2.0.
“I took a step back and thought, ‘What would it do for us if we were getting half the exposure Crowley is getting?” Gilmartin said. “Would we be adding 2 million users a month? 3 million?”
He further pondered, “Should we take the buckets of profit we’re making and go hire ten PR firms and buy some advertorial?”
His Boston-based company, which like Foursquare enables users to find businesses near their location, is growing fast and boasts some 3 million users, about three times that of Foursquare. And, unlike Foursquare, Where has a working business model and is cash-flow positive.
Yet it’s missing the blog buzz that surrounds Foursquare, founded in early 2009 about five years after Where formed. The latest scuttlebutt about Foursquare: Venture firms are fighting to invest in the company at a lofty valuation while Yahoo Inc. has reportedly made a $100 million buyout offer.
“Foursquare is being valued on the potential,” said Ryan Moore, a Where board member and general partner at GrandBanks Capital. “They timed the market better. They’re starting fresh and leading with a marketing edge and letting the product catch up.
“The bottom line is that local ad spend is being massively disrupted by these handsets and real-time location. There’s no more valuable context than location.”
Given that scenario Moore believes it’s time for Where - until recently called uLocate Communications, to step up its profile. “We’ve got a great business model and now we have to match that with awareness,” he said.
Gilmartin said the company, backed by $16 million from GrandBanks, Kodiak Venture Partners and Venrock, is going to use a traditional approach to its increased marketing efforts, with plans to turn its social media and public relations campaigns up a notch. He declined to provide specific revenue figures, but he did say Where added 600,000 new users in March, compared to an addition of 100,000 in November.
Where delivers local content to mobile devices, including everything from the weather, news, and restaurant reviews, to the closest coffee shop, cheapest gas, traffic updates, movie show times and more. The content is available through a free downloadable application for smartphones, or as a $2.99 monthly subscription service for feature phones with GPS.
When opening the application on an iPhone in the Dow Jones offices in midtown Manhattan, then clicking on the “Restaurants” icon, Where shows a list of eateries in the area, including Del Frisco’s, directly across the street. Clicking on Del Frisco’s brings up an address, phone number, reviews and links to the Web site and menu. It also allows users to “check in,” like Foursquare’s service, and interact with other users who may be in the same location.
While they are similar, Where currently exists as more of a feature-packed utility, while Foursquare’s gaming feature separates it from the pack. Foursquare encourages members to check in at venues and awards the most frequent patron the title of mayor. Users compete for mayorships and badges, such as the “Crunked” badge awarded to a user who checks into four different venues in one night. That competition may explain why it’s generating so much attention. The app also lists information about local venues and tips from other Foursquare members, such as “New must-have: Halibut Saltimbocca paired with 2006 Domaine de Ferrand Chateaunef du pape.”
Ultimately, Foursquare and Where, and others like them such as Gowalla Inc. and Loopt Inc. will by vying for the same hyper-local advertising dollars that location-based services can attract - not to mention, possibly competing against larger players like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. looking to get into the action.
Where’s revenue model has gone through some trial and error. The company had to learn how to serve ads on a mobile device in a way that doesn’t turn users off. “We found that consumer’s didn’t like the ads and if they’re not going to click on them, we’re not going to make any money,” Gilmartin said.
Bringing in local ad inventory that blends into the application’s suggestion pages was the key for Where. For example, a restaurant who has purchased a local ad is highlighted and placed at the top of the search results with a note that says “Sponsored Result.” “We said, wow, we’ve replaced non-contextual ads with something that’s relevant. Consumers now say, ‘Thanks for removing the ads.’ Winner winner chicken dinner.”
What Goes Into Redrawing http://bit.ly/blAPWC
I’m redrawing the ways I do business, the ways I connect with people, the ways I spend my day. It’s a process that requires a lot of thought, a lot of reconsidering, a lot of paper. It requires asking myself tough questions, and deciding whether or not I can handle the answers. It requires a lot of shutting out of the outside world, and thinking inwardly. I thought I’d write a bit about the process, because so many people asked. This has precious little to do with social media marketing, but everything to do with human business.
I decided to tell myself the story of me, the story of me for the next few years. This comes from my experience with Don Miller’s book. In my efforts to determine how to conduct my business and my life, I started with goals. I won’t share the details, but I have goals for (in no order):
Those are the major buckets, at least. And I cut those down from 17 projects. I killed about 10 over the last two days. That was first: deciding what goals would yield the best rewards for me (I measured “best” by happiness, satisfaction, money, time).
By starting with my goals for those various buckets/roles, I can then ask myself every time something new comes in: “Does this contribute to the success of my goals?” Having the answer this this is golden.
I use paper when I redraw. I quite literally draw little pictures with circles or boxes, and I do lots of simple math (I really only know how to do simple math, but if I wrote just “math,” you’d think that I was doing something huge).
On paper, it’s a lot easier to see what’s working for me. For instance, I’m a believer in the mindset of having multiple revenue streams. I have a job (president of New Marketing Labs), but I also make some of my money speaking professional, through my affiliate programs, my books, and through a few other sources.
When I put down what I could make from where, it helps me understand where to focus some of my attention to achieve my revenue goals. But then, I have to overlay the “time” goals, the happiness goals, etc. With PAPER, it’s a lot easier to overlay information for my consideration. For instance, I can draw a little “$, T, H” symbol for money, time, happiness and determine which meets more of the criteria. Make sense?
This part is the hardest for me. I don’t really handle silence well (thinking about you, Alanis). But I can’t do what I’m doing to redraw, answer emails, tweet, and all that. I paused a lot of the external noise so that I could find some silence. I’m still doing it as I type this. And yet, I sneak back into my noise because that’s part of my job, and thus, at present, I have to maintain some of it.
But, if you asked, silence would be a vital element to the process, and I’ve done what I can to silence the noise when I can.
I described the process to a friend the other day like this: “You might see a chip of paint peeling on the wall and think, ‘huh, this wall needs painting.’ I look at the chip of paint and think, ’should this wall even be here? Should *I* even be here?’”
I look at the frames through which I see things. For instance, do you see yourself as an employee or a leader? I know some people who make amazing employees, but who are horrible leaders. I’m not even the best leader (Justin can tell you that), but I’m a great operator/thinker/tinkerer. I’m the kind of person who can see something unique, noodle it into a working prototype, and then get others to weaponize it (most of the time). Knowing this about myself lets me know which types of businesses I’ll be better suited to create/operate.
What types of questions are helpful to redrawing?
These are somewhat from my perspective, and somewhat generic. You can make your own questions. They’re free. The answers sometimes cost money, but the questions are free.
Goals without plans are meaningless. Plans without deadlines and measurements are wishes. Thus, I have plans in place. They are very flexible plans, and they rotate on a few of my goal/measurement hinges from above, but they are clear and I will know if I achieve what I set out to do.
The thing is, I know that I won’t be successful if all I do is write out some new plans about my business. It won’t work. I learned that from reading and exercising what I learned in Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. So, I have to build the entire frame of what I do. Here’s some of what’s included in that framing work (in no real order, and in no real system – YET):
You know, things like that. But then, I also have real live plans with numbers and dates attached to most of those. Like weight goals, fitness goals, etc. So that’s the most important part.
In this case, I mean check-ins to reconsider how I’m doing with my framing. I have mine set for every four months. That way, I can analyze a bit at a time, without tweaking it so often that I feel I’m not getting any traction. But without checking in, I don’t get the chance to see if this is all making sense and heading towards an end goal.
That’s the stuff I’ve put into it.
Lots of us get stuck and stay stuck. Lots of us worry about things outside our control. Lots of times, we’re looking at that peeling chip of paint and not the wall, the house, the town, the land. But we can choose to redraw. We can choose to really look at every decision we’re actively living with, and see whether there aren’t better ways to reach our goals.
Does this make sense to you? Have you ever tried a process like this? How did it help?
How have you come to the decisions you’ve made right now, and what do they mean to you?
Google Bookmarks now includes an experimental feature (for English users) called Lists for privately saving links in buckets, sharing them with friends, or publicly publishing them to the Web. Coupled with the recent addition of stars in search, Google Bookmarks — an oft-ignored product — is a lot more useful.
Lists introduce the notion of social bookmarking to the Google service, which was previously a private bookmarking utility. There’s also an array of features — like list comments, in-line YouTube and content previews, recommended links and location features — included with lists.
After you navigate to Google Bookmarks you can either spontaneously create new lists from the left-hand menu or add them on-the-fly by ticking desired links and clicking the “Copy to list” button and selecting “Create new list.” What’s especially interesting is that if Google detects local links in your lists they will automatically provide a map for context. Google can also suggest links related to those collected in your lists via algorithmic analysis.
In terms of use cases, one that becomes immediately apparent is for those of us who frequently search for the same types of queries. During your typical Google searches, if you remember to use the star feature you can then return to Google Bookmarks to organize those starred results — which are automatically saved as bookmarks — into lists. For writers, researchers, and other hyper-searchers, lists in Google Bookmarks could prove to be a huge timesaver.
You can watch a tutorial around the new Lists feature below, or check out a collection of helpful information on Google Bookmarks Lists in this public list created by Google.
[Img credit: Ei! Kumpel]
Tags: Google, Google Bookmarks, social bookmarking
The man with a monster of a job http://goo.gl/xSW2
Interview: Steven Moffat on the challenges of running Doctor Who
If I'm not mistaken, Steven Moffat suddenly shudders. But the new Doctor Who showrunner, previously the creator of such creatures as the flesh-eating shadowy Vashta Nerada and the clockwork robots that terrorised Marie Antoinette, and the writer of Blink (frequently said to be the best Doctor Who episode ever), isn't chilled by the thought of malevolent monsters, unappealing aliens or sinister villains soon to appear in the Whoniverse. Rather, he winces at the prospect of a Conservative government – and specifically the influence that Rupert and James Murdoch may exert over it, its media policy and its attitude to the BBC.
"I hope the Tories don't win. Let's not beat around the bush," he says. "[But] I'd hope that anyone who becomes prime minister would look at the organisation and ask themselves if the world would really be better off without it." Moffat is not blind to the corporation's faults, but sees it as "an incredibly responsible and brilliant organisation" that is "never given credit for trying to hold itself to a higher standard, one that no newspaper or other broadcaster is".
As for the Murdochs, Moffat is mordant. "Are we really going to put James Murdoch in place of [the BBC]? Can you imagine how shit everything would be? Never mind the fine and glorious things that the BBC does, imagine how shit everything would be! Stuff would be shit! Let's not have really good restaurants, let's have Kentucky Fried Chicken!"
It is fighting talk, and perhaps predictable from a man who has been given the keys to one of the BBC's biggest shows. But the Paisley-born teacher's son, who was a teacher himself for three years, is in ebullient mood. The Eleventh Hour – the new series's first episode – approaches, and he's counting the days until we see Matt Smith's Doctor and his new companion, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, embark on their debut adventure on 3 April.
Buckets of cash
When MediaGuardian interviewed Russell T Davies on the eve of the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, the question was: would anyone watch a rebooted version of what was deemed to be a ropey old drama? Few could have imagined the amazing monster that Davies's Doctor Who would become and its transformative effect on British TV – not just spawning Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, but making Saturday- night family drama an attractive proposition. While Davies's Who was by no means perfect, the show Moffat inherited is not ropey but revered. And besides winning awards and regularly pulling audiences in excess of 10 million, Doctor Who makes buckets of cash.
The precise worth of the brand is a closely guarded secret, but according to BBC Worldwide the drama has been sold to over 50 territories and has shifted more than 3.3m DVDs, more than 7m action figures and, in 2009 alone, around 300,000 books. And then there are the pencilcases and folders, Cyberman and Dalek masks and the deal, reputed to be worth £10m, to bring Doctor Who to Nintendo DS and Wii. Meanwhile, David Tennant's final outing as the Doctor secured BBC America's highest primetime rating and Doctor Who is BBC Worldwide's top-selling download on iTunes in the US.
In short, it's a behemoth of a brand. The burden Moffat bears, therefore, is quite different from that shouldered by Davies in 2005, and it's something of which he's very conscious."To me, a 'brand' sounds evil," he says, "reminiscent of men in tall hats running factories and beating small children, but you have to be across it. All those things should be joyous – those toys should be terrific – because the active creative engagement of children with Doctor Who is unlike any other show that they watch. When Doctor Who is over, they get up, invent their own monster, their own planet, their own Doctor and play. I know because my son recently designed a new Tardis control room. If anyone said to me 'invent a new monster so we can sell more toys', I'd kick them out of my office."
Moffat says he doesn't have an agenda for how his Doctor Who will differ from Davies's but "these things happen as a matter of instinct" and his instinct led him towards a more "storybook quality". "For me, Doctor Who literally is a fairy tale. It's not really science fiction. It's not set in space, it's set under your bed. It's at its best when it's related to you, no matter what planet it's set on.
"Every time it cleaves towards that, it's very strong. Although it is watched by far more adults than children, there's something fundamental in its DNA that makes it a children's programme and it makes children of everyone who watches it. If you're still a grown up by the end of that opening music, you've not been paying attention."
Not paying attention is not something you could accuse Moffat of. He is immersed in the Doctor's details and has the show "in his bones", but acknowledges there's "a huge, huge, monumental difference" between being part of the writing team – producing episodes that tap brilliantly into such childhood anxieties as fear of the dark or of what happens in the world when you blink – and running the whole shebang. The size of the job made him think twice, as did the amount of time that he would have to spend in Cardiff; the London-based writer has two young sons with the TV producer Sue Vertue. In the end, though, after his dad sent a childhood photo of him reading a Doctor Who book, there could only be one decision.
"You don't think of it in terms of a challenge. You think 'Ooh, wouldn't it be great to do that!' and I'm now in the fortunate position of being able to think that and make it happen."
Making it happen means going boldly, and with a "Geronimo!" that appears to be a catchphrase of the new Doctor. Moffat is reluctant to plunder Who's history without good reason – "The more you back-reference, the more it feels like a sequel and the sequel is never as good as the original" – but that isn't to say that the past is another galaxy. "Old favourites can return, provided you can do something new and exciting with them. There are no past characters coming back in this series, but I imagine that kids would love to see Captain Jack meet the new Doctor."
Although he's been able to fund a rearrangement of the theme tune, new titles and a new Tardis interior, Doctor Who is "subject to efficiency savings like everyone else. [But] no one is going to say that it looks cheaper because it doesn't." And despite the fact that "all we writers really want to do is write a script, toss it over a wall and go out with strippers", Moffat is in charge, in his element. He may be known for the clever, darker episodes of Doctor Who but he has mischief in mind now. "I want to do more fun. I hadn't done an episode one, which is a very different kind of episode, and I hadn't done a finale either – and that was a hoot."
And what happens in that? "Practically everything," Moffat smirks. "And some of it twice."
The man with a monster of a job
- Russell GAmazon S3's new Versioning feature has now graduated to production status! Once you have enabled versioning for a particular S3 bucket, you can create a new version of an object by simply uploading it. The old versions continue to exist and remain accessible.
Versioning's MFA Delete feature has also graduated to production status. Once enabled for an S3 bucket, each version deletion request must include the six-digit code and serial number from your MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) device.
Read the S3 documentation to learn more about these important new features.
Here's a roundup of the tools and toolkits that already support S3 Versioning and MFA Delete:
I decided to have some fun with the new versioning feature!
I found some pictures from a few years ago, sorted them into chronological order, turned on versioning for one of my S3 buckets, and uploaded each of the pictures to the same S3 object, creating a series of versions.
The first of the pictures can be seen at right (wasn't I cute?).
Here's a complete list of the versions for this object. Each one is linked to a particular version of the picture:
I can always get to the latest version of my picture using the URL http://aws-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/jeff_barr.jpg. I can also use a versioned URL to access any version that I would like.
-- Jeff;
Just search for the term “wordpress backups” in the official WordPress plug-ins directory and you’ll be surprised to know that there exist over 100 plug-ins just to help you easily backup your WordPress database and other associated files.
There are so many choices but most backup plug-ins often work the same – they’ll take a full dump of your MySQL database and will then save the zipped file into the same server that is hosting your WordPress blog. Some plug-ins can even send you backup file as email attachments.
If you are on Amazon S3, I highly recommend that you use the WordPress plug-in from Dan Coulter to automatically backup your blog to the S3 cloud. Here’s why:
Reason #0. There’s absolutely no configuration required – just add your Amazon S3 access keys and the plugin will do the rest. It will even create S3 buckets for you where the WordPress files will get saved.
Reason #1. The plug-in won’t just backup your WordPress databases but it will save a copy of your WordPress themes, plug-ins and other important configuration files (like .htaccess, wp-config.php, etc) to Amazon S3.
Reason #2. Amazon S3 charges you for every byte of data storage so you can set the plug-in to automatically delete backups that are older than a month.
Reason #3. You can either run scheduled backups (once per day, or per month) or take snapshots manually. The backup happens in the background and you don’t have to wait in the browser for the process to complete.
The Automatic WordPress Backup plugin is available on wordpress.org but before you hit the download button, here’s a word of caution.
The plug-in, once installed, will automatically add links to the author’s site in your WordPress blog without even asking you. That however should not prevent you from using this extremely useful plugin as the links can be easily removed from the options pages (see the second screenshot).
Backup your WordPress Blog to the S3 Cloud
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.
