Phine Solutions web work notes

Last week Amazon A3 was down for 4 hours and made a lot of webmasters unhappy. It further proves that it is quite risky to design your site solely relying on A3 to provide the essential functionalities, at least for now.

One way to reduce the risk is to have a copy of the files, for example images, saved in your server and design a flag in your code to pull the file from your own server if A3 downtime was detected. The flag can be controlled by some parameter in a configuration file so it can be easily switched.

One might argu this defeats the purpose of using AWS storage since the load copies take up the space. But I believe the storage cost will worth it in the event of the A3 hiccups. By using A3 service when it’s up and running, you will still save the bandwidth when serving those files, which is a lot more expensive than the storage cost.

Good documentation can save a lot of time to look for the information that you have once obtained. I had been looking for some documentation system that can help me to write down notes and finally decided to use a wiki.

Using a wiki can provide some great benefits:

• It is web based can I can access anywhere.
• My documents can be organized by sites and category so I have a central place to look for things that I have done but not necessarily memorized.
• Easy collaboration with others.

There are several free wiki softwares and I chose DocuWiki after some research and test run. Since I only need a simple interface to create structured content DocuWiki was a good choice for me. This is a nice comparison on some popular wiki software that I also used to help me make my decision.