Bad Design
The first cup, the illy cup contained a delicious cup of coffee had at a crepe shop in Kailua, Oahu called Crepes No Ka Oi. The cup has this little handle that, even if you had small hands, you just couldn’t get enough leverage to comfortably grip the handle and at the same time keep your finger, in this case, your middle finger, away from the side of the cup. Instead, you need to rest your finger on the bottom side of the circle against it and the cup, scalding your finger in the process. Or, get a workout during your morning brew enjoyment.

Good Design
The second design I recently stumbled upon in my office while enjoying a scalded cup of folgers, aka, a not so great cup of coffee. However, the cup turned out to have a perfect handle for larger hands and in general, a well thought out design for any hand size in my opinion. The top has a nice ledge to rest your thumb and the swooping remainder of the handle allows adequate space away from the side of the hot mug while also being curved (or swooped if you will) in a way that naturally follows how you would want to grip a handle.

While the illy mug may look fancy, I think I would rather have my coffee in a to go cup than that thing again. These two designs brought me back to a classic book that any engineer should have if they’re thinking about getting into product design. It’s called The Design of Everyday Things (affiliate link by the way) and is a good little collection of designs and why they are the way they are to make life a little better functionally. And who knows, you may even be able to design something that looks good and be functional after reading it.

Well I couldn’t really find the answer in any one single place (as usual) and I must be honest, I’m not entirely sure this is the exact way to go about this. However, I recently ran into the issue that my site on Amazon EC2 started going all whonky with MySQL running errant commands, changing everything to uncategorized, and having my server become unresponsive.

Turns out, it was because my EBS volume was full. Too many pictures, too many posts, too many files. So, I needed to figure out a way to increase the EBS volume quickly. Luckily I had taken a few snapshots along the way so I didn’t need to start from square one. However, you may need to or you may to start your Bitnami image off with more than 10 GB.

You can easily check the used space of your volume by running the following on your instance via SSH (see the original tutorial for more information.)

$ sudo df -h

You should see something like this. NOTE: your values will vary.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.8G 9.4G 600MB 98% /

If you see that, or if you want to increase the size of your bitnami instance (or any AMI for that matter) go through these steps.

Launch AMI or Use Existing
First launch the AMI you want to increase the EBS Boot size. You may already have one running. If you do, use that one.

Take a snapshot of current EBS volume
Now, go into the EBS Volumes tab and select Create Snapshot. Choose the EBS volume from the instance you just launched or one you’ve already been using.

Create Volume from Snapshot
Now head over to your snapshots. You should see the volume you just created. You’ll want to select the Create Volume button so you can create a volume from the snapshot you just created. When this pop-up comes up, enter “20 GiB” or whatever size you want and choose the sanpshot you want to create from.

Attach to your instance
Next you’ll want to attach this new volume to your instance. To do this you’ll need to:

• Stop your instance, the one you just created or have been using
• Detach your current 10GB EBS Volume
• Attach the new 20GB volume you just created in the last step to this instance
• Start your instance

Resize your EC2 Instance with EBS Boot
Finally you’ll need to resize your EBS boot so it knows it’s bigger.  You’ll need to connect via SSH to do so.  Again check out the original tutorial for more information on how to connect if you don’t know.  Once you’re connect you’ll need to run.

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1

You’ll see some thing going on, some words pop up, then you’re done.  Restart Apache.

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Presto chango you’re done.

Now, if you ran into the same issue I did above and you didn’t create a snapshot recently you may need to SSH into your old instance and try and download your mySQL database. Check out my first tutorial for that. A lot of times even though you can’t see the main page of your site you can run the backend which doesn’t use php and take a bunch of memory.

So, we have to do a few things to access it. First off, you probably learned how to gain access via SSH in the last tutorial I wrote. If not, I suggest heading over there.

Next we have to give ourselves permission to access phpmyadmin. To do this we need to allow access to it.

$ sudo vi /opt/bitnami/apps/phpmyadmin/conf/phpmyadmin.conf

change “Allow from 127.0.0.1″ to “Allow from all”

restart the server

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Although your phpmyadmin is protected by a password, some of you might not want to leave your database accessible via web access.  If you don’t, just reverse order the above and change back to “Allow from 127.0.0.1″

If you want to access phpmyadmin you’ll need to go to

http://yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin

user: root
password: bitnami

So, now that you’ve just allowed everyone to see this, I suggest changing this before you go and blog to the world about setting up your wordpress blog on Amazon EC2.  To change this I used a reference towards the bottom of this page. Just add your password into “new_phpmyadmin_password” below.

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/apache2/bin/htpasswd -cb /opt/bitnami/apache2/users administrator  <new_phpmyadmin_password>

Again restart your server

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

MySQL Password Change
While your at it you may want to change the mysql root password as well, just for safety. Use this command, just like you did above and then restart your server and mysql as I suggest elsewhere in this tutorial.

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -p -u root password <your_new_password>

Fun times with EC2!

This tutorial is how I add YouTube and Vimeo videos to single posts in wordpress and how I automatically pull in their associated thumbnail preview images into my archive pages for cool video archives.

As you probably know if you’re reading this, adding youtube and vimeo files to your wordpress website via the embed or iframe coding can be a pain if you ever want to change the format of your site. What if you want to pull in the thumbnail preview images for use in archive pages? What if you want to change the width at any time?  It’s a hassel to do this either manually or via MySQL find and replace commands.

I ran into similar issues on my Hawaii site, AlohaUpdate.com.  I wanted to pull the thumbnail preview images for each video into my  archive pages and the sidebar and then pull the large video player via embed or iframe into single.php files.  However, I wanted to be able to change the sizes in the future in case I reformatted, or changed the layout of the archives page.

You can see examples of the archives page in the Hawaii Video’s Section of AlohaUpdate.com where you’ll be able to select a video and see how it comes through in the single.php files.

The only piece of information that is tied to a post in wordpress is the unique video ID for Vimeo or YouTube.  That way, you can change the code for displaying your design, or those video services evolve.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to:

• Add Custom Field for YouTube and Vimeo Unique Video IDs
• Add Custom meta box to the post edit form to add your video IDs
• Add custom code to your archive pages to display video thumbnail preview images
• Add custom code to your single post pages to display the videos as you wish

Simple right?

Add Custom Fields & Meta Box Via Functions.php

First off, you need to attach the unique video ID to a post.  You could use a new category and just place the code into “the_content” and then base the archive and single page code off of the category ID, but what this method will allow you to have the same category, or multiple categories and be backwards compatible.  ie, It’ll check to see if the post has a youtube ID listed, and if so, display from your custom code, if not, you can display “the_content” and any other code you want.

Add this bit of code to your “functions.php” file.  You’ll be adding the metabox for the custom field and then saving the data to the post.


// Create the Video Information Meta Box by hooking into the admin menu for a post
add_action('admin_menu', 'video_add_box');

//save the video custom fields
add_action('save_post', 'save_video_meta', 1, 2);


Add YouTube & Vimeo to Single.php WordPress Posts

Now on to the good stuff.  For this particular example you can get all the information on customizing the embedded object in the youtube documentation over here and for embedding vimeo into your wordpress site you can get the options over here.

We’ll be building our embed code from the ID and whatever options we want.  I have chosen some width and height options and some other basic options for both vimeo and youtube and put them in below.

<?php
$ytubeID = get_post_meta($post->ID, '_youtubeID', true);
$vimID = get_post_meta($post->ID, '_vimeoID', true);
if ($ytubeID || $vimID){
if ($ytubeID){
$ytube = 'http://www.youtube.com/v/'.$ytubeID.'?fs=1&hd=0';
echo '<br />';
echo '<object width="640" height="390">';
echo '<param name="movie" value="'.$ytube.'"></param>';
echo '<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>';
echo '<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param>';
echo '<embed src="'.$ytube.'" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="390">';
echo '</embed>';
echo '</object>';
} elseif ($vimID){
echo '<br />';
echo '<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/'.$vimID.'?title=0" width="640" height="390" frameborder="0"></iframe>';
}//end if yutbeID or vimIDthe_excerpt(); //excerpt added for information
?>


Add Small Thumbnail Video Images with Play Button on Archives Pages

This one takes a little more customization.  You’ll need to have cURL enabled on your server.  Most PHP installs have this running but if you don’t, you’ll have to have your server admin get it going for you.  Check out cURL Manual if you want to know more information.

Both youtube and vimeo allow you to grab the screen shots used for preview of their videos.  For youtube they are at http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtubeID/0.jpg For more just change the the #.jpg.  I stick with 0 which is the larger one and allows me to mess with sizing more than the mini images.

For vimeo you have to go and pull the information from their api which can be found in their API documenation.  From there you build the correct URL using the $vimID obtained from the custom field and you return the php version from vimeo.  Then you pull the bits you want, in this case the video thumbnail, and then your good to go.

Also in this, I use a play button with the image below and style it in my “style.css” file with the following.

span.playbutton{position:absolute; left:5%; top:7%; filter:alpha(opacity=70);  opacity: 0.7;}

Then add this to the archive pages. You may need to select for specific categories and if you have some videos that don’t have Vimeo or YouTube IDs you may need to add some if statements to display “the_content()” if there is no ID in the custom field of the post.


<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php
$ytubeID = get_post_meta($post->ID, '_youtubeID', true);
$vimID = get_post_meta($post->ID, '_vimeoID', true);
if ($ytubeID){
$ytube = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$ytubeID.'/0.jpg';
echo '<div style="float:left; padding:5px;">';
echo '<div>';
echo '<a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="'.get_the_title().'"><img src="'.$ytube.'" height="133px" width="200px"/>';
echo '<span class="playbutton"><img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/playbutton.png" /></span>';
echo '</a></div>';
echo '</div>';
} elseif ($vimID){
$info = 'thumbnail_large';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$vimID.php");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$output = unserialize(curl_exec($ch));
$output = $output[0][$info];
curl_close($ch);
echo '<div style="float:left; padding:5px;">';
echo '<div>';
echo '<a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="'.get_the_title().'"><img src="'.$output.'" height="133px" width="200px" />';
echo '<span class="playbutton"><img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/playbutton.png" /></span>';
echo '</a></div>';
echo '</div>';
}
endwhile; ?>


Using the above code, you should be able to pull videos into your wordpress site using just the youtube or vimeo video ID and be able to customize the look and feel of the output for future updates to both services.  You should also be able to pull thumbnail previews into archive pages, sidebars or wherever you want them using a simple cURL pull.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

This task can really be as tough and as easy as you need it to be. And, Although I don’t mind a little server management, I wanted a server setup that ran easy with the often finicky wordpress CMS. I could do a custom install, setting up all the correct permissions to get auto-installs to work, cron applications, file writes, etc, or, I could make it easy and use an Amazon EC2 Instance that was “stacked” for wordpress.

Enter, the bitnami wordpress stack which is essentionally all you need to launch or transfer WordPress to Amazon EC2.  In the process, I tried to make an easy tutorial since I found the current documentation not as suitable as I’d like. Hopefully this helps you get your wordpress install running in the cloud.

In this tutorial you’ll:

1. Sign-up for Amazon and AWS Services
2. Launch a Bitnami Instance with EBS as Root Device
3. Allocate an Elastic IP Address
4. Access your server via SSH using Terminal (MAC) or Putty (PC)
5. Access via FTP
6. Transfer a large database
7. Transfer your wp-content folder
8. Redirect your domain
9. Change your default URL location
10. Remove UpdateIP for Static IP Address
11. Tweak the Performance of your Micro EC2 Instance

First a quick note.  If you want your current domain name to map quickly after changing the DNS zones you may want to lower the TTL at your current host.  This is pretty host specific but if you google “your hostname” and “lower TTL” you should be able to track it down.  On mediatemple it’s here.

Sign-up for AWS

First things first, Signup for AWS and EC2. Just head over to aws.amazon.com and follow the instructions. If you don’t have an amazon account you’ll need to start there, but once you have one, add a credit card to it, then you can sign-up and be on your way.

Make sure to sign-up for EC2, and any other services you think you’ll need. For starters, you’ll just need EC2, but S3 doesn’t hurt to have going right away either. You’ll need to click through the tabs in your amazon web services console and follow the instructions. It’s pretty quick and easy. Singing up for all of them doesn’t cost you until you use them, so go for it. In fact, as I right this, Amazon is giving you an EC2 micro-instance for free.

Launch an Instance

First things first, choose your region. You’ll want to choose a region that’s close to most of your audience traffic or maybe even you want to change and put it close to the audience your going after, see what Matt Cutts says about geolocation of server and SEO to decide.

This can be found on the main Dashboard for EC2. Here’s a snippet of the screen.

As we said earlier, launch your bitnami wordpress instance. You could setup your server from scratch and start with a simple linux instance from amazon, but then you’d need to add the mysql, php, etc, etc. And to get some plugins to function properly, you’ll need to have all the goods that you probably haven’t thought of.

So go to http://bitnami.org/stack/wordpress and look under cloud and amazon AMI for the latest and greatest. You can also search community AMI’s right in AWS console for “bitnami wordpress.” I chose the 64 bit version because some people talked about the need to upgrade and that some of the larger instances only come prepared on the 64 bit instances.

Because Windows is more expensive on AWS and you don’t get the free tier (more on pricing here) and we like Linux, we decided to go with the most recent wordpress release, 3.2.1, running on 64 bit linux that has and EBS for root device… see after the screen shot for what the heck a root device is.

OK, so running off of an EBS means all your server files, ie the mysql database, php settings, all the things you’ll mess with, plus you’re entire wordpress directory, will be running off of this. In the future, if you need to upgrade, reboot, backup, run a test server, etc, you can easily copy attach move and do all this because you have an EBS volume. Think of it as your server files on a portable harddrive that you can take with you to the next server. Sweet! (I’ve already used this with a reboot, test site, and plugin development, pretty amazing, but more on that in another post.

Once you find it, click on launch.

Instance Details. The next screen will allow you to choose how many and what size instances.  If you want it to be free (for a year), choose the micro instance, also, you can choose the availability zone from your region or just let it autochoose. Then click continue.

Instance Details Part 2. The next screen allows you to set a kernel ID, RAM Disk ID, etc termination protection, and shutdown behavior. Termination protection if for those of you with fat fingers that think they may terminate the instance via the command line tools. It protects this from happening so you can only terminate from AWS Console. Shutdown behavior is important. When you shutdown the instance or it shuts down because it has had enough you want it to stop. If you terminate it, all data will be lost and your EBS volume with be gone, ie all your data. Set this to stop. The others, leave default as they’re beyond the scope of this tutorial. Click Continue.

Key value is good so you can reference via the command line by a name or so when you login to your AWS console you see the name of your instance rather than just a bunch of numbers. Use Key = Name and Value = [Insert good Name here].

Key pairs are important. It lets you access your data from FTP and from SSH. You’ll need this if you haven’t set one up. If you have one already, just use the same one by selecting it. Note, when you select create you’ll need to “create & download”, put this file, the “.pem” file in a folder that you can either run terminal out of on a MAC or create some putty keys with on a PC. So don’t loose it.  I like to organize all these in a folder and keep it in a location I can remember.  Or maybe you should use Dropbox, then you can use the same across all your computers.

Once you’ve downloaded this, Press continue.

Security Groups. You’ll need to setup “security groups” for your instance. This is another way of saying how can I access the server/instance. This will give you SSH (and SFTP), HTTP, and HTTPS. Name the security group something cool and hip, describe it, and add some rules. For the rules choose SSH from the list and 0.0.0.0/0 pops up in the source. Leave that. In fact, 0.0.0.0/0 will be the source for all of the ones you add. Click add. Repeat for HTTP and HTTPS. Once you’ve added, then proceed. Note, you can reuse this for multiple instances.

Check everything out on the final page, which if this is your first one, you probably have no idea what it means. So just launch it. Micro instances are free (ok just one for the first year) so have at it. You’ll never learn unless you try.

Visit Your EC2 WordPress Install

Now, go to the EC2 tab of your AWS dashboard and click on the instance you just started.  At the bottom of the dashboard some information will pop up.  Look for the line that says “Public DNS”.  It’ll look something like this.

Obviously your ec2.##-##-###-##.lo-cation. will be different.  but copy and paste into your browser and you should see the bitnami welcome screen.  Great!  Your wordpress install is at ec2-##-##-##-##.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/wordpress/.  Don’t worry, we’ll change this in a little bit.

A little bit about your public DNS.  This is a general DNS that gets associated and disassociated as you start and stop an instance, move your EBS Volume etc etc.  This isn’t good because instances can crap out, sometimes we’ll want to stop them, and so forth, we’ll need something that’s more static.  Like an elastic IP address.  These are elastic because you can move them around, but the address remains static, the same address.

Allocate Elastic (Static) IP

OK, now we need to allocate an elastic IP.  This is free, as long as you attach it to an instance.  We will use this IP address later in the game so we can direct our domain name to it via a CNAME.

First you’ll need the “Instance ID” which is on your main EC2 dashboard for the instance that you just started.
Next, go into elastic IPs menu located in the sidebar of the EC2 dashboard.
Click Allocate New Addresses
Select EC2 for EIP.
Now go to “Associate Address”
Choose your instance ID from the menu.
Click Yes, Associate.

Bam, it’s done. This will change your public DNS from ec2-XX-XX-XXX-XX.loc-ation.compute.amazonaws.com to your new IP address denoted with Ns ec2-NN-NN-NNN-NN.loc-ation.compute.amazonaws.com.

Make sure to remove UpdateIP from your bitnami install or bitnami will try to reset your IP when your instance starts and stops. You can find that bit below, after we go through shell access.

Redirect yourdomain.com to Your EC2 Instance

The next step is to use your new static IP address by redirecting your domain name to this address. As mentioned above, you’ll does this by creating a CNAME record for your domain. Your registrar should have a tutorial on doing this, or should make it really easy.

If you’re on GoDaddy, just follow this tutorial for adding a CNAME record.

SSH Access to EC2 Server

OK, now let’s access this server you’ve just created from SSH.  This can be done via Terminal that comes with your MAC (check out utilities) or Putty on a PC. Note: get Putty and PuttyGen. There’s other services out there, and if you use one, you’ll know, if not, use the ones I mention.

Hopefully you’ve placed the keyname pair file, “yourkeynamefile.pem”, in a folder somewhere that’s easy to access. Make sure that you change permissions of the file to 644. You can use something like filezilla or from your shell

$ chmod 600 yourkeynamefile.pem

What we’re going to do now is setup your shell program to read this file as your “password” rather than you having to enter a password to access via shell.

MAC
If you’re on a MAC, you’ll need to go into terminal and “cd” into the folder that has the .pem file so you can logon to your server from SSH out of that folder, or you can use Go2Shell from the Mac App Store which installs a button on the folder and then just navigate to the folder via finder and click the button.

To access your server via ssh use your public DNS with the new elastic IP and use “bitnami” as the user.

$ ssh -i yourkeynamefile.pem bitnami@ec2-NN-NN-NNN-NN.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

Once you’re in skip the PC steps below and move on to…

PCFirst off, a good reference for this is here.  First, make sure you grabbed putty and puttygen from the link above.  Since putty needs a different type of keyfile you’ll need to create that with this step. Now run puttygen.

First you’ll need to load yourkeyfilename.pem created above.  Find the file, click open, then click ok to the dialogue telling to do the next step. Now, click “save private key” without entering a passphrase.  Keep the defaults there.  Save it to the same folder that you have your .pem file in.  This file will be a .ppk file.

Now go into putty and go to the “SSH” category under “Connection” and select “Auth”. These are all in the left box.

Click browse under the “Authentication Parameters” section and find the .ppk and click on it and open it. Now, you’ll want to go back up to  ”Session” in the left hand category box.  Enter your hostname as your public DNS which will look like ec2-NN-NN-NNN-NN.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com. Click Open at the bottom to open the connection.

A box will pop up, just click yes, it’s about some security safety whatnot.

Login should be blinking on the screen.  Type “bitnami” as your login.  This is your user.

Success, you’ve now logged on to your server and are ready to go.

FTP Access to Bitnami EC2 Install

Now we want to really get our hands dirty and get FTP access to our EC2 bitnami instance by following these steps.
Depending on when you’re reading this, the bitnami wordpress stack probably has VSFTP installed. If not, you can easily and quickly install VSFTP on your EC2 server.  A good resource on this is here but the command I used is this.

# sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Follow the steps under Harsha has put together but use the username “bitnami”. I’ve copied the steps below from his site in case it goes down but you should definitely check his out for completeness. You can see his EC2 FTP connection tutorial here.

1. Goto Menu panel : Edit >> Settings
2. In the Select Menu (Tree side bar on the left)
goto Connection >> FTP >> Active mode>>Select the option “Ask your operating System for the External IP” in the Active mode IP
3. Goto Connection >> FTP >> Active mode>> Select the Option called “Fall back to Active Mode” in the Passive mode tab.
4. Goto Connection >> SFTP >> Add your “pem” file using the Add key file button. (FileZilla will automatically convert the pem key into Filezilla readable keyfile)
5. Press “YES” to the Dialog box allowing Filezilla to covert the Key file.
6. Then All done. But dont forget to press the OK button hidden in the bottom of the Left side Bar tree menu of the Same Window
7. Goto File >> Site Manager >> Select “New Site Button”
8. Give your EC2 details as necessary.
Host : your public DNS of Ec2
Port : keep it blank
Server type : Select SFTP
Logon type : Normal
user : bitnami
password : keep it blank. (password is not needed Filezilla will Automatically use the Keypair instead)
9. Now you might be in General Tab. Goto the “Transfer Settings” Tab and change the Transfer mode to “Passive”
10. Press the “Connect” button to Save the Changes and Connecting to the host.

You are now connected.  Get to the main base folder if you’ve ended up somewhere else. ie, get back to “/”.  Look for the “opt” folder.  This is where all your wordpress info is stored (at least at the time of me writing this tutorial. The folder you’re looking for is your “htdocs” folder.

/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/wordpress/htdocs/

Now all you have to do is transfer over your “wp-content” folder and any other files from your old server that you want in other folders, just make sure… DON’T TRANSFER YOUR wp-config.php folder..

Change your default URL and other httpd.conf adjustments

So your default install is at http://www.yourdomain.com/wordpress/ but you want it to be just www.yourdomain.com. This is pretty easy and you can check it out here in the bitnami documentation. Only tricky part is “where is your install directory”. At the time of this writing bitnami made the install directory on Amazon EC2 under “/opt/bitnami/”. So following the instructions, access your server via one of the SSH methods above. Then:

$ sudo vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

Scroll down and find the following and change the uncommented “Document Root” to what I have below, or, dare I say, what works for you.

#
# DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your
# documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but
# symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.
#
DocumentRoot "/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs"

Then , as the bitnami tutorial says, change the following section to match the above. Just look for where it says “#This should be changed to whatever you set the DocumentRoot to. That section is also a giveaway as to where the next change, “AllowOverride All” is location as the tutorial isn’t all that clear.

#
# This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.
#
<Directory "/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs"> 

Now, within that section that you just changed there should be an “AllowOverride None” You want to change that “None” to “All”. There are a few of these but you’ll know it’s the right section if there is a lot of commenting within thesection.

AllowOverride All

The next two that you can uncomment (aka remove the “#” symbol) are the two includes mentioned here. The mpm and default includes will both be commented out, make them look like this. Note, you’ll need to do some httpd-mpm.conf file tweaks for performance. These are mentioned later on in this WordPress-to-Amazon-EC2 tutorial:

# Server-pool management (MPM specific)
Include conf/extra/httpd-mpm.conf

# Various default settings
Include conf/extra/httpd-default.conf

Finally, you’ll need to look for the following and add the “#” symbol to the front to comment it out. It should be close to the bottom.

#Include "/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/wordpress.conf"

Don’t forget, save these changes using :wq and then restart apache.

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

That’s it… you can also create a virtual host which is what a lot of people do. But I thought I’d do this way since there’s plenty of documentation out there.

Transfer your WordPress Database to EC2

Finally, you’ll need to transfer your old database to amazon EC2. This can be done a few ways but I’m going to assume that your database is too large for you to deal with some of the simpler phpmyadmin (learn how to get phpmyadmin access to bitnami EC2 stacks here), and shell “send” commands that you could use. There’s also plugins and other ways but basically you’ll want to get a mysql backup of your database with –add-drop-table to your new Amazon EC2 instance. I’m going to show you a way to upload the file to the server via FTP and then use SSH to upload/replace the current bitnami fresh install wordpress.

First off, although I’m not a big fan of Mediatemple’s DV servers, I love their gridservers and have done a few transfers back and forth from each. So with that, if you want a good tutorial on some of the backup and transfer, I suggest this one. But here’s the quick of it, and remember –add-drop-table.

$ mysqldump –-add-drop-table -uusername -ppassword databasename > mysqlbackup.DATE.sql
$ scp mysqlbackup.DATE.sql example.com@example.com:/home/00000/data/

Now via FTP go to the folder you placed the mysql backup dump folder in and copy it to your desktop, then copy it to your Amazon EC2 server. I prefer putting it in a folder somewhere in the wordpress install. How about the wordpress root install at “/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/”.

Finally, SSH back into your Amazon EC2 server and run this line.

$ mysql -uroot -pbitnami bitnami_wordpress < /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/mysqlbackup.DATE.sql

Using an Elastic IP? Remove UpdateIP File

If you’ve set an elastic IP address you’ll need to remove a file from the bitnami stack. This file is in here to deal with starting and stopping an instance or if your public DNS IP changes on Amazon EC2. Which if you don’t attach an elastic IP to your instance, you’re address will change!

You can check this out for a little more info but basically do this…

$ cd /opt/bitnami/
$ sudo rm updateip

That should keep bitnami from resetting your IP within the stack and wordpress install.

Necessary Performance Tweaks

These performance tweeks come with time and took running into some issues with the server crashing. If you’re on a micro instance from EC2 you only have 613MB of Ram provisioned to your instance. This isn’t a lot of you get even a little bit of traffic, especially with a database intensive CMS like wordpress.

Think of each client, when they connect, as using a little bit of the RAM. That ram can stick around, but you also have some ability to kill the processes when new requests are made. Again, I go back to Agile Web for a quick reference.

First enable httpd-mpm.conf by uncommenting it in httpd.conf if you did not do so in the section above called changing your default URL.

$ sudo vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

Look for

# Server-pool management (MPM specific)
#Include conf/extra/httpd-mpm.conf

you’ll need to remove the # sign before the Include so it looks like

Include conf/extra/httpd-mpm.conf

then :wq to save and exit

Now head over to the httpd-mpm.conf by

$ sudo vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-mpm.conf

and look for the following, it should look something like.

StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

that 150 is a lot of RAM. change it to that following, or mess around with it to get one that you like.

StartServers 10
MinSpareServers 10
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 20
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

save and exit.
Finally restart apache, and just for safe keeping restart mysql.

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart mysql

Add compression support

One more tweak you can do is to add compression support to your EC2 Apache instance. A good resources on this tweak is here. Once again you’ll need to go into httpd.conf and do some editing.

$ sudo vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

The mod_deflate module should be uncommented but make sure the following line is uncommented.

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

Then add the following to make sure all the appropriate files that your apache server will be serving are available from compression by this apache module. You can add it right below the load module. You also may want to add a comment or two above it stating where you got the info from. I like to do that just in case I need a refresher.

#Add compression support for Apache 2.0
#Information found at
#http://www.technologypoet.com/running-wordpress-on-ec2-with-a-#little-help-from-bitnami/
#The following lines were added down to the close"
<Location>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom_xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-fastphp
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-eruby
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
</Location>
DeflateCompressionLevel 9

#close add compression support for Apache 2.0

once again save the file, then restart the Amazon EC2 Instance

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

In Closing

If you’ve gotten through everything here you should have a pretty darn quick Amazon Web Services EC2 server running wordpress. There’s plenty more you can tweak, adjust, add, etc, but this should get you to a good place.

You can do it from scratch, but that’s another tutorial altogether. If you’re still curious about a scratch install, check out 2bit-coder.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact me.

During that year in the air there have been a lot of changes to the industry due to every single airline except Southwest loosing money because of high fuel prices. Airlines are going out of business. Airlines are charging for baggage. Most airlines have done away with free food, although that was mostly last year, this year a lot of airlines have cut out the free bag of mixed pretzel things. And, although I’m not sure on other airlines, United has cutout Champagne in first class.

On top of all these changes, routes are getting cut to reduce capacity which means crowded flights full of extremely grumpy people and long standby lists.

While these changes might be necessary to cut costs and stay in business I for one think they were poorly implemented, but that’s another story. What this article is about is why airlines aren’t doing more to produce more revenue rather than cutting costs?

Why aren’t they selling me things in the air?

First, accept credit cards, you have the persons name with more security than any other place on earth, its not a security thing, figure out how to do it. Hawaiian only accepts credit card by the way….

Next, why not sell better snack selections? I as recently on a flight that instead of $6 snack packs they sold huge pringles stacks and trail mix for $3. How about a candy bar, healthy snacks, better food choices?

Next, why not get rid of some storage that weighs 200 pounds, gotta be able to cut that out of something, and bring on board 50 personal video players all loaded with 20 movies each, charge $10 per flight to rent them.

How about you sell headphones, noise canceling. Offer for people to try some on the plane, accept credit cards, then sell them a pair.

How about other things to rent? (and that doesn’t mean pillows and blankets, what a dumb idea that was whichever airline it was)

Best idea of all to sell to this captive audience….. Don’t know yet, but be innovative, think of something, and make more revenue. Don’t cut costs to make your service worse.

I writer this while I sit on the runway waiting for our gate to open.

Many reporters, economists, and wanna be economists are comparing the recent stock market crash to the famous crash of 1929. The crash that marked the start of the Great Depression. The crash that changed America. But is it really the same?

Knowing little about the 1929 crash I haven’t really been able to make the parallel myself. I’ve been stuck listening when I’d love to offer my own opinions. So a few weeks back when I was, surprise surprise, waiting in an airport I stumbled across a used book with a title staring back at me. Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929.

I decided to buy the book and begin to read it on my 14 hour journey back to Hawaii from the mainland. The back cover seemed to have rave reviews (which rarely happens on a book cover) and the thought of finally figuring out what caused the stock market crash was intriguing enough.

Turns out it was an amazing book. It reads like a story rather than restating facts in dry collegiate language. It kept me reading and interested in something that most would find a boring subject were it not strikingly similar to todays events.

The author, Maury Klein, writes Rainbow’s End not focusing on the events right around 1929, but rather, builds up to the crash. Starting at the turn of the century. He talks about how the automobile transformed American way of life more than any other invention ever had. Klein focuses on the effects the automobile had on how people traveled and interacted with people, the status symbol a car made, the drive by manufacturers to reduce the cost making it more of an minorly-expensive commodity than a luxury item. And most importantly he talks about how automakers begin to shape how companies did business.

He focuses on one big player, with big ideas, Billy Durant who helped create holding companies like GM to brand different cars and build huge conglomerates. Durant lived the American dream and Klein captures the most pivotal moments of that dream.

He goes on to talk about how banks began to transform. He talks about how America used to be a country of men and women who saved, and worked hard to save some more, but began to turn to country that used credit to purchase things. (sound familiar) Fueled by the automobile, large appliances, and other luxuries, America began to buy things now on want rather than on necessity.

He talks about how banking giant of the time National City began to offer trading of securities all over the US, not just to the wealthy in New York and Chicago. How citizens were talked into buying on margin, and that the market would always go up. How the government sat by as banks were allowed to offer whatever they wanted to customers, manipulate stock as they saw fit, and get away with a lot that today would land you in jail.

The parallels, as you can read from above, are amazingly similar to today. The 20′s built into an enormous bubble of lavish spending that burst in late 1929. While Klein doesn’t go into detail much after the crash, he does talk about Hoovers unfortunate taking over of a market on the verge of disaster and his real inability to use the government to overcome a widespread depression.

If you have any interest in the stock market of today, and wish to learn from the past, read this book. Maybe you’ll be able to read the market better and see why the government is so scared of banks collapsing and people losing all of their credit.

From time to time I’ve discussed on this blog managing multiple writers for my blog network, Blogtown Press. Mainly I’ve dealt with the odds and ends of finding, organizing, and paying bloggers to writer on one or many of my various blogs. Those articles are helpful but they haven’t really given tips on helping with the task of managing these writers through WordPress.

Managing writers, even with wordpress can be a big task. While there are plugins that help you it’s always tough to sort through them all and find the plugins that help you the most. Well, I recently began to rekindle my interest with the internet, blogging, and building a business by paying freelance writers to build content and thought I’d begin to share some tips with my readers about how this process is going.

I’ll jump into the business side of things more a little later (recently I created an LLC for one of my blogs and hope to expand that blog into a full business with possible full-time employees.) But first let me pass along some information on a plugin I happened across. The plugin is Role Manager which allows you to set specific rules for the roles inherent in WordPress and change how they act. While the codex for role management does a little bit to help you understand the roles capability, it doesn’t really give you full control over what these various roles can do. They’re predefined.

Well the Role Manager plugin lets you change that by providing an interface to manage the inherent roles. Also, which is probably the best part of the plugin, is that it allows you to create new roles and set options for them. For example, let’s say you have most of your writers setup as contributors but you want one of them to have the added ability to upload files, like images. You don’t want to give everyone the chance to upload files, because you might not trust everyone as much as this person to upload non-malicious files, so what do you do?

You can create a new role and set it to a contributor upload role, or whatever name you choose obviously. You can then have everything the same as the settings for a contributor but the new role will allow this special subset of contributors to upload files.

This is just one example but you can see how this wordpress plugin allows you to customize and better manage your writers and members of your wordpress site to be able to have more features than the defaults. This allows you, as an employer of freelance writers to give your writers more options without giving away all the accessibility of say, an Editor.

What a great idea! Informing and leading the general public from a medium that most Americans have access to. I always wondered why previous presidents didn’t put their weekly address, on the television. I’m not talking about press conferences. I’m talking about some sort of weekly address that speaks honestly to the nation.

Maybe they have previously done this on tv. But I haven’t noticed it. YouTube is such a brilliant idea. I’m not sure how it’s comment feature for such showings will go. I can only imagine the comment battles that will go on. Maybe you’ll be limited or maybe they’ll close the comments.

Either way, it’s great to see government coming into the new age. Maybe he can spread the thoughts to other forms of government and we can stop wasting so much money…

Either way, I stumbled across this new company in a small article in wired magazine that combined t-shirts, social networking and you cell phone. Although the idea is still growing on me and I can’t see it getting much more than a cult following, the concept is great! Take something that’s been around forever, the t-shirt, and make the message it delivers fluid.

I’m not talking about creating a digital screen print on a t-shirt that changes. I’m talking about a new company called W-41. It’s a new company out of the Netherlands that’s decided to take your t-shirt to the next level.

W-41 places a design on the back of their designer t-shirts. The design looks like a futuristic barcode. Then while you’re out at a club, the supermarket, or walking your dog, anyone with a phone and their free application can snap a photo of your barcode and up pops what you’d like. A message, your website, your facebook info, your myspace, or anything you choose.

While the idea in this application seems a little hard to get widespread popularity (unless of course it becomes standard on every t-shirt design) the concept is great. I’ve heard of applications for cell phones that have barcode readers and pop up info of products right in stores but this goes even further. It marries the photo recognition software with useful applications, right on your cell phone.

Think of all the possibilities: A cell phone app that takes pictures of products or barcodes and up pops Google Shopping Search to tell you how cheap you can get it online, or amazon reviews to tell you how bad the product is.

Portable apps are tying together every aspect of our life and if you can get even a small cult following, you’re doing something right.