Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Getting Closer to the Clouds
I decided to write a post about cloud computing, because I am using less and less of my own resources and more and more of what is freely and cheaply available on the internet. It saves time, money and space.
You may be using the cloud without knowing it. If you use webmail like Gmail, an App like Picnik, or host your blog at WordPress.com or Blogger, then you are using the lower levels of cloud computing. You are taking chores and storage and moving them from your computer to a place online where you can access them from any computer and as time goes on, from your phone also. I host my own blogs for the sake of control but I really on Gmail to hold all my database backups.
Of course, cloud computing gets a lot more complex than this. In fact, most of the times the term is used, it is not used for webmail. It is used by developers who build apps on top of platforms like Google App Engine. Or for Amazon Web Services which does everything for you except serve the resulting data in html form.
I have been a little afraid to release all of my data to the cloud. But then again, I can’t say that I have had pristine success at storing it myself. I’ve deleted things on accident, had Thunderbird crash and overwritten things. So maybe it’s time.
Today I had an issue on this blog. The two longest link lists I have disappeared from view. Now, I don’t know how long this has been this way, but I had to find a way to fix it. I went to edit them and the links were there, but when I looked at the source of the finished post, nothing from within the WordPress loop showed. Most likely a plugin to process something in the loop timed out. After 400-600 links I would think it would.
First I thought I would give more processing time to PHP. Then I thought I might find the plugin causing the issue. At one time I wrote a lot of code. But the new internet landscape with web apps, open source software, and cloud computing has made my job easier. So I looked for a way around the issue. It’s not effecting anything else. They are abnormal posts. I went to Zoho. I have two accounts. One for me and one for All About Doors and Windows.
I imported the data in a minute or so and grabbed the code to embed it in the following two pages:
Not only did I fix the problem but I made my life a lot easier. No more editing the posts, copying and pasting, etc. I change the data in the Zoho app and it changes here. In fact, the software I wrote to check the links will connect to Zoho and update it. So there is no reason really to go back and edit the app.
But that is not all. Here are some other things I have done with Zoho:
Although I focused on Zoho here, there are a lot of apps that will save you time. Any one of the forms created above could have taken hours. I look forward to seeing where technology like this goes in the future. Because this is small potatoes.
13 Responses to Getting Closer to the Clouds
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I gotta be honest and please excuse any ignorance here, but I’m not entirely sure what this is telling me?
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..7 Turbo Writing Tips
My mistake. It’s pretty unclear. I have lately been writing posts way to close to the research I have been doing, which leaves gaps.
When the internet started to get easier to use for the average individual, the biggest move you could make in building a site would have been to have your own dedicated host. But the power of even this is limited.
The trend now is to host your site somewhere but use another service for all your heavy processing. That way the hosting provider will do only it’s specific job of serving pages.
One site that does this is Entrecard. If you notice, all the links from the widgets are through Amazon-AWS. That is where all the data is being processed.
I recently found another good use trying to create a river of news from 600 sites. If I ran the script to do this on my site, it would take a lot of processing power to update each feed even once daily and with news river, it’s better to have everything up to date.
So instead of doing it myself, I used a service to turns all these feeds into one. Then I display the resulting feed. Now I only have to update one feed.
Some things are best done by others who can afford to sell the processing power for less. I am not sure how many dedicated servers I would need to keep up a constant display of these feeds and still be able to serve the site. If I updated once an hour for each feed, every six seconds, the cron job would run.
Ah OK, that’s a little better lol. I’m not too techie, but gettin there
So normal site operation run by one, cool extra power suckers run by a second…that about right?
Now to figure out how to do that…
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..12 Ways To Outsell Your Competition
Not much of this is needed for blogging, but for building other sites, it may help. I built a database of over 1,000,000 affiliate products. I need a way to serve it eventually. Research. It makes my posts a little incomplete.
Cloud computing is still a tat of a mystery to me, although I have a gmail account and we use some of google apps. It’s hard to do your work, do all the extras like having a blog, AND stay abreast of technology. Wow.
It’s about impossible to keep track of everything, but when I need a tool, I am glad everything goes so fast. It means I don’t have to hunt for the service I need or write it. By the time I need it, it’s there and either free, open source, or really cheap. The internet of today sure beats the internet of only a couple of years ago.
Yes, you are right. The internet is superfast now with providing tons of free tools and software, which has made my life a lot more productive and ‘amazing’. I would never have dreamt that one day I would have a podcast … for example.
I shall keep on looking on the bright sight of light… lol
It is definitely going fast. I tried to keep up with all the new apps coming out, but that just drove me crazy.
Not sure if you know but Microsoft has released a CTP of the new Azure Cloud computing platform. The release will be next year probably. Right now I’m playing with the CTP version and all I can say is that it’s very promising. A few things are not implemented yet, but if everything turs up the way I expect them, then cloud computing and hosting will become very popular.
I have noticed more and more cloud computing companies popping up lately.
Cloud computing is still a tat of a mystery to me, although I have a gmail account and we use some of google apps. It’s hard to do your work, do all the extras like having a blog, AND stay abreast of technology. Wow
I use Ubuntu for my cloud computing as it offers 2gb of storage for free. You can find more info at Ubuntu One if this helps anyone and it no cost to use Ubuntu.
I use Ubuntu One to help with sharing files and as a means of backup. Ubuntu is a free platform which I think will start to be more appealing as it grows.