HTC was never a handset make in the limelight until Android made its debut. Suddenly, they were one of the most popular handset manufacturers on the market, with models like the Wildfire and Desire HD flying off store shelves and receiving great reviews from the press.

The iPhone, while lauded as the world’s best smartphone by many a user, has also been plagued by a recent poor design choice for the iPhone 4′s casing, resulting in the phone losing signal when held in a normal, right-handed manner. Their solution? Pay more for a rubber case to go around the sleek metallic edges of the handset.

It’s arguable that this wouldn’t have happened with HTC, or indeed any other manufacturer, and iPhone sales are rising despite this hiccup. But perhaps one of the reasons Apple are reluctant to give iOS to handset devs isn’t because it’s theirs and theirs alone – perhaps it’s because there’s a chance a company like HTC could do a better job.

Keeping their operating systems exclusive to their own platforms has always been Apple’s modus operandi, and whether you’d like to use OSX or iOS to work or play Party Poker, it’s certain you’ll be paying through the nose for an Apple device unless you’re IT-savvy enough to get a Hackintosh set-up running.

There have been hoaxes, where individuals have created mock-ups of iOS running on a non-Apple device, but thus far, no one’s cracked it yet. This is primarily because Apple ensure that their operating systems work alongside specific hardware, which makes it harder for other devices to emulate the OS to a high standard.

Would we use a HTC iOS device? Probably – there’s no reason not to, and this goes for a wide range of makes, from Samsung to Nokia. But Apple’s OSX and iOS are their golden geese, so for now we’ll just have to wait, or splash out on a device fresh from the Steve Jobs production line.

• BitDefender Warns iPhone Jailbreakers About Security (1)
• Unlocked Apple iPhones being sold in Hong Kong (5)
• Globe will sell iPhone in the Philippines: Mixed reactions (7)
• Your iPhone could be toxic?! (4)
• Short-of-expectation iPhone 4s and Samsung Galaxy Nexus leads to hopeful 2012 (0)

Finally, here it is. The steps I used to speed up this WordPress-powered blog of mine with Amazon CloudFront CDN.

By now you’ve probably heard of and know what a CDN or Content Distribution Network is? Not yet? Here’s a recap. A Content Distribution Network or CDN is a network of servers scattered throughout the globe, usually in strategic places called ‘edge locations’, that contains copies of your website’s files or content. It could be images, videos, PDFs, scripts, CSS files etc.

When someone visits your website, the server nearest geographically to that visitor delivers the corresponding site files it has, instead of being pulled from the actual server hosting your website, which could be a thousand miles away from that said visitor. The effect is faster load times for your site which is what visitors really really love.

Amazon CloudFront CDN is exactly that, a network of edge servers throughout the world ready to host your site files and speed up your website. Today, I’m going to help you integrate it with your WordPress blog making it load even faster than before.

Things you need:

Amazon AWS account – to access Amazon CloudFront CDN and Amazon S3
W3 Total Cache Plugin for WordPress
S3Fox plugin for managing your AWS account via Firefox

Here are the steps:

1) Sign up for an Amazon AWS

Create your Amazon Web Services account which is your key to signup for Amazon CloudFront CDN and Amazon S3.

Once your signup is completed, you will be given an Access Key ID and matching Secret Access Key which you will need later on in this setup.

Remember to keep this only to your self

Amazon S3 is a cheap storage solution that will used to store your files for use by Amazon CloudFront CDN. They’re like twins that make this magic happen.

2) Create an S3 bucket.
Download and install S3Fox for Firefox. Use your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key mentioned earlier to get it working with your AWS account.

Once connected, create an S3 bucket and name it something like “cdn.yourdomain.com” in my case I used “turbo.jrocas.com.ph”

This is where your theme and media files will be stored and Amazon CDN to use as an origin or source for distribution of your files.

You need an Amazon S3 bucket to host your files.

3) Create a CloudFront Distribution
Choose the bucket you’re going to use as an origin for Cloudfront, right-click then select enable distribution.

Follow the steps to create your Amazon Cloudfront distribution

4)Create CNAMEs for your CDN
This is a fancy way of masking the ugly default URI of your CloudFront distribution, e.g. “http://d346xe97ckw69d.cloudfront.net” into something much cooler like a subdomain for your URI which is “cdn.yourdomain.com” or what ever you like to call it. In my case I used turbo.jrocas.com.ph. Plus, this makes it look that you’re some big Internet magnate or something.

5) Create the CNAME records for your domain
Contact your webhost or domain registrar for assistance with this step, tell them you want a CNAME record that lets cdn.yourdomain.com to point to your CloudFront’s default URI http://d346xe97ckw69d.cloudfront.net. Wait for a few minutes or hours for the changes to be propagated.

Remember to coordinate with your domain registrar or web host to create these CNAME records

I used four subdomains, turbo, turbo1, turbo2, etc. because most browsers can perform simultaneous HTTP requests for faster web page loading. Though others may not agree with this method. It’s really up to your preferences.

6) Setup your WordPress blog
Download and install the W3 Total Cache plugin. This is a popular and powerful caching plugin that easily integrates with most CDN providers like Amazon CloudFront with your WordPress blog.

Configure W3 Total Cache plugin

It’s completely up to you whether you’re going to deploy all the caching features of the W3 Total Cache plugin but for this tutorial, we’re just going to focus on getting it to work with your newly created Amazon CloudFront distribution.

7)Upload your files to Amazon CloudFront
After uploading your static files to your Amazon CloudFront distribution, you can preview how it will work or deploy it live to your blog. And that’s it, your WordPress blog is now being accelerated by Amazon Cloudfront CDN, just like the other pro-bloggers who also use other CDN providers to speed up their blogs.

You can use various online tools to see how it has improved your blog’s load times but expect to see an improvement of around 3x or up to 6x in some geographic locations.

Another great thing about this whole setup is you can turn it on or off whenever you feel like it and no harm would come to your blog.

Compared to most CDN providers which provide bulk charges, Amazon CloudFront is more cost-efficient because of its pay-per-use billing scheme and reasonable rates. You can use it for a month, a week, half-a-year and you only pay for that long and how much resources like storage and bandwidth you have actually used.

Hope this has helped you a lot and if you have questions or experience with Amazon CloudFront or other CDN providers, do share your stories with us through the comments thread below.

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When I got my copy of the Thesis WordPress Theme, one of the design elements I wanted was to have a proper box in the sidebar where readers can easily subscribe to this blog’s feeds and connect with me via social networking sites.

Upon knowing that Thesis is backed up by wonderful support from DIYThemes and the community of Thesis users, I was confident the ‘social media links‘ box would up and running within a day or two of switching to Thesis. Turns out that this is not 100% true as some of the tutorials listed in the support forums are either outdated or have been taken down by their creators who have probably moved on to other projects or themes.

As many of you have noticed, that social media links box has made its appearance just today. The delay was caused by my entry-level CSS and PHP coding skills but ultimately a tutorial listed as a must-see resource for customizing Thesis, but has been left with a broken code which has rendered it unusable for ordinary Thesis users like yours truly.

That tutorial is “Adding Social Media Links to Thesis” by Adam Barber. It’s over a year old and the blog itself which hosts the tutorial has been left idle for a long time now. Which was frustrating because his tutorial was exactly what I needed.

My obsession for getting a social media links box for my blog and my penchant for messing around with PHP and CSS has pushed me to troubleshoot the code and make it work. After spending some three hours on it, I now share a ‘fixed’ code from the tutorial which I then customized according to my own preferences.

Note: The following steps and code were heavily based on Adam Barber’s original tutorial, so all credits are directed at him.

Step 1.

The code below goes into your custom_functions.php file. Added were the missing opening div class selector. Don’t forget to put in the correct links to your RSS feeds or social media profiles.

// Social Media Links Function

function social_media_links(){
 ?>
 <div class="socialmedia_sidebar">
 <ul>
 <li><a id="rss" href=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheFour-eyedJournal">
 <span>Recieve updates</span>
 <span>via rss feed</span>
 </a>
 </li>

<li><a id="email" href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=TheFour-eyedJournal&loc=en_US">
 <span>Subscribe</span>
 <span>via Email</span>
 </a>
 </li> 

<li><a id="twitter" href="http://twitter.com/jhayrocas">
 <span>@jhayrocas</span>
 <span>on twitter</span>
 </a>
 </li> 

 <li><a id="facebook" href="http://facebook.com/JuliusRocas">
 <span>Julius Rocas</span>
 <span>on facebook</span>
 </a>
 </li>
 </ul>

 <div></div>  

 </div>
 <?php
} 

// Add the function to the proper hook
add_action('thesis_hook_after_multimedia_box', 'social_media_links');

Step 2.

The code below goes into your custom.css stylesheet. I’ve made adjustments suited for this blog and have removed the hover effects. Also, the span selector had been fixed to match the code above for styling the links.

/* Define the clear div to offset the link floats */
div.clear{ clear: both; height: 1px; width: 1px; }

/* This is the style for the container */
div.socialmedia_sidebar { background: #eee; margin: -20px 0 5px 0;
/* If you are using this below the media box,
use a negative top margin to raise it up. If not, adjust accordingly */
padding: 5px 0 118px 10px; border-top: 1px dashed black; border-bottom: 1px dashed black; }

div.socialmedia_sidebar ul li{ float: left; list-style: none; text-align: center; }

div.socialmedia_sidebar span{ font-size: 1.7em; display: block; }

div.socialmedia_sidebar span{ font-style: italic; }

div.socialmedia_sidebar ul li a{ width: 200px; padding: 5px; display: block; border: 1px solid #fff; }

/* Non-hover profile links */
#twitter{ background: #FEF9BF url('images/twitter-48.png') 5px 5px no-repeat; height: 44px; text-indent: 35px;}
#facebook{ background: #FEF9BF url('images/facebook-48.png') 5px 5px no-repeat; height: 44px; text-indent: 45px;}
#email{ background: #FEF9BF url('images/email-48.png') 5px 5px no-repeat; height: 44px; text-indent: 40px;}
#rss{ background: #FEF9BF url('images/rss-48.png') 5px 5px no-repeat; height: 44px; text-indent: 45px;}

The end result is what can now be seen on the sidebar of this blog underneath the multimedia box. Icons used came from the social media icon pack by Kadom, which is available as a free download. Except for the Email icon which I had to create myself using a PSD template that is included in the same icon pack.

Tools used were gedit, because I’m using Ubuntu, and Firebug extension for Firefox. Hope this will be of good use to my fellow Thesis users and if you’re not using Thesis yet, I suggest you do. This neat customization and many others will soon be available to make your blog top-notch.

• Thesis 1.8.2, Jetpack and few other updates (2)
• Blog reboot: Now running on Thesis Theme for WordPress (6)

This blog had seen better traffic days and had not experienced traffic spikes from Digg, Del.ico.us or StumbleUpon in the last 12 months. But in the rare cases it did, all of the shared webhosting services I’ve tried broke down and came close to suspending my account because of the sudden strain on their servers.

Upgrading to a VPS or dedicated hosting is not the solution at this time because those traffic spikes were just temporary, and after the buzz, I would be left with a much more costly hosting that I actually don’t need most days of the week/month.

Getting more storage and bandwidth from my current webhost would just be a temporary solution, because as the Uploads folder gets fatter with media files over time, it will not only need more storage space and bandwidth, it ultimately gives more load to the server’s CPU. In a shared web hosting environment, that’s a major problem.

The solution then is to offload media content, primarily images, to somewhere else that is more capable of handling and serving that content. That’s where Amazon S3 comes in.

What is offloading content and what is Amazon S3?

As mentioned earlier, offloading content is hosting static files like images, CSS files, JavaScripts, etc. to a different server. While this is a common technique in high performance systems like Google, Flickr, Tumblr, etc. ordinary webmasters and bloggers like us can also benefit especially if our shared webhosting environment is struggling with the load.

Amazon S3 or Simple Storage Service is ‘a dedicated static file hosting service on a pay-per-usage basis. With no minimum costs, it might be practical for lower traffic sites which are reaching the peak that a shared or single server can handle.’

I admit that when I first head about Amazon S3, I thought it was reserved only for the big boys and developers who really know how to setup and optimize web servers and stuff, you know, real server monkeys and those with deep pockets.

It turns out that Amazon S3 is cost-effective as it’s on a pay-per-use basis. Their current rates are reasonable and practical. I won’t go into full detail about their pricing schemes but from what I’ve gathered, high traffic sites which use Amazon S3 spend an average of $2-10 a day. This blog is not on that level yet, so costs are projected to be a fraction of that per day. And so as traffic grows, so will the site income right?

The steps I followed in this setup can be found on Inquisitr, which offloaded their images to Amazon S3 back in September of 2009.

Things you need for this project

You need an Amazon AWS account. It’s easy to sign up for or if you already have an Amazon account all you need now is to add a credit card to that account to be able to sign up for Amazon AWS which would be your gateway to having an Amazon S3 account.

Setting up your Amazon S3 bucket

Once you have an Amazon S3 account, you can use the S3Fox plugin for Firefox which allows you to fully manage your Amazon S3 account. If FireFTP is for handling your FTP needs, then S3Fox is for handling your S3 account all from the comforts of a browser.

You simply need your Amazon S3 Account Name, Access Key and Secret Key. All these can be found in the “Security Credentials” section of your Amazon AWS account.

Create an S3 bucket using S3Fox

Once S3Fox is connected to your S3 Account, you can use it to create what Amazon calls a “bucket” or a folder in Amazon S3. Click on the blue folder with a star to create your bucket, use a name that is unique and descriptive of its function. In this case, since it would be used for storing images from your WP blog, the typical name would be: images.yourdomain.com.

Edit ACL using S3Fox

Right-click on it, and select Edit ACL. Make sure that you, the account owner, is the only who has the full access control to that bucket while the public aka ‘Everyone’ is only granted ‘Read’ permission.

Once that is done, we’re ready to prepare your WordPress blog to work with your Amazon S3 bucket.

Setting up your WordPress blog

The most common plugin used for this is the Amazon S3 for WordPress plugin. It has been a long while since the author updated the plugin but it works well with WP 3.0+. Download and install the plugin in your blog.

In the Amazon S3 plugin setup page, you’ll need again your Access Key and Secret Key.

Amazon S3 for WordPress plugin (click for larger view)

Choose the bucket you created earlier using S3Fox from the drop-down menu.

Ask support from your webhost first regarding CNAME records creation.

‘Hostname settings’ this is a tricky part. If you want your images to have the url images.yourdomain.com instead of images.yourdomain.com.s3.amazonaws.com, then you would need to create a CNAME record for your domain.

It’s risky setting this up on your own using CPanel, so the best way is to contact the support team of your webhost or domain registrar and request that they create the CNAME entry for you.

Just tell them that you need ‘images.yourdomain.com’ pointed to ‘images.yourdomain.com.s3.amazonaws.com’ wait for the propagation which could last between a few minutes to 24 hours.

Enabling File Uploads will allow all of your WordPress uploads to go to your S3 account. This will add a new button next to the Upload/Insert section whenever you create a new post, allowing you to choose between your server or S3 on a per post basis.

Expires Header is a feature that is related to caching. Since blog posts are often updated over time, enabling this option will do no harm.

File Permissions – enabling this is a must because it sets all your uploads to be publicly viewable. S3 sets files to private by default so this feature saves you the trouble of tweaking permissions for each file uploaded.

And that’s it! You’ve now setup your blog to offload your uploaded images and media to your own Amazon S3 bucket.

Advantages:

• Less system demand for your server.
• No need to worry about where to host your images or media, because it’s all up in the ‘cloud.’
• Your images would be served more reliably because you’ve got Amazon’s vast infrastructure handling it.

Disadvantages

• Costs could go up as you use the service more, but as a result of traffic growth
• Your images are now in a third party server so complications about copyright or country-based restrictions may arise.

As for me though, I’m happy with the setup. Images I use in this blog, including the theme elements are served faster and have improved page load times. I’d give it a month’s trial to see how it performs and if the costs are justified.

But offloading images to Amazon S3 is only one half of this grand plan to optimize your WordPress blog. In the next installment, I’d tell how I setup my WP to be optimized using Amazon Cloudfront CDN. Stay tuned for that.

• Using Amazon CloudFront CDN to speed up WordPress (7)
• Amazon Cloud Drive – No file sharing, no privacy (0)
• Hosting Facebook: A Real Test for Cloud Computing (0)
• Windows Cloud – will Microsoft finally take Google head-on? (0)

So, you have an iPad and cannot wait to get it out of its packaging to explore its exciting features. Some of the device’s features may need you to connect to the Internet. Before you get started however, you need to be able to connect to the Internet on your iPad. You are able to use it with wired connectivity because it has a dock connector, but the simplest and most popular way to connect to the Internet on your iPad is to use a wireless connection.

If you have high speed internet at home this is ideal for browsing on your device. If you do not have high speed internet then it’s recommended to purchase a high speed internet deal, as this will allow you to get the most out of your iPad. After all, you do not want a slow and sometimes disconnecting iPad. Fortunately, modern technology allows you to get the best deals for your Internet.

The iPad is able to pick up a wireless connection and connect to that when a password has been inserted. This will then be saved for future uses so you don’t have to remember it every time. Broadband gives you this freedom, and is a lot easier than connecting to the Internet with wires or cables. Make sure you get the most out of your iPad.

Connecting to the internet on your iPad can be expensive depending on what type of broadband you decide to use. If you opt for home broadband you are likely to find the best broadband deals online and all you need to do is pay a monthly fee for a great service and fast broadband. Do be careful if you decide to use mobile broadband pay as you go or take out mobile broadband as a contract, as some providers offer unlimited browsing but with a fair usage policy. Fair usage means your provider reserves the right to manage your speeds at certain times of the day, or days of the month, to make sure everyone on the network enjoys the same quality of service.

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