Floyd’s Thoughts…

Amazon EC2 really is amazing, and the Elastic Block storage is pretty darn good too, however I wish you could automate the snapshot process form the EC2 console.

It is however pretty easy to do yourself using a simple cron job.

Before you start make sure you have a JRE:

	sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

You will also need the EC2 API tools:

	wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
	unzip ec2-api-tools.zip

At this point you should make a metal note of where you unzipped the api tools to.

Now that you have the prerequisites you need the following simple script:

	#!/bin/bash
 
	export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/
	export EC2_HOME=/root/ec2-api-tools-1.3-42584
	export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/data/misc/pk-Umbongo.pem
	export EC2_CERT=/data/misc/cert-Umbongo.pem 
	export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="Twinkle Twinkle Little star"
	export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="If your happy and your know it, clap your hands"
 
 
	$EC2_HOME/bin/ec2-create-snapshot vol-999999

Obviously you need to specify your volume id where i have vol-999999

Once you have modified this file to be executable you are ready to test it.

	chmod +x snapshot.sh
 
	./snapshot.sh

Once your have ran it go to the EC2 Console and verify that the snapshot process has started.

And thats it, the first time you run this script the snapshot will take a while to complete but the next one will be much quicker as the snapshot process is incremental, so only the changes since the last snapshot will be read.

Oh, don’t forget to create a cron job for this (*/5 * * * * /path/snapshot/sh)

Bing loves us,
Google thinks we are cool,
and Yahoo would cross the road it it saw us coming…

If you search for “Subversion Hosting” on the three major search engines you will see pretty mush the same bunch of results just in a very different order.

for instance Bing has Code Spaces right at the top (YAY!) however Google has Code Spaces in at number 6 (hmmm!) and Yahoo! has Code Spaces at number 10 (Bah!).

Obviously Bing and Yahoo! mean absolutely nothing when it comes to traffic (relative to google anyway) but its interesting how all three has slightly different opinions about the web. Personally I think Bing have nailed it

We have been working on the CodeSpaces.com website for a while and today released it to the world, it’s likely to evolve quite quickly as we are trying to catch up on all the SEO work we haven’t done over the last 2 years.

Check it out at http://www.codespaces.com

As part of my role at Component Workshop Ltd over the last 12 months I have been responsible for internet marketing of our Code Spaces product and in this time we have spent ~£20,000 on google adwords.

While I have not compiled the stats in a presentable form I can say without any doubt that bidding for the #1 spot on your given search phrase is not only expensive in comparison to the 2nd – 10th slots it also yields pretty disappointing results.

Recently I have been able to cut a third off our Google Adwords spend while retaining the same level of conversions by doing no more than excluding the #1 slot from our adword bids.

While I can’t fully explain why this phenomenon occurs my feeling is that as users of google we are instinctively drawn to the genuine search results verses the sponsored links and as the 2nd and 3rd placed sponsored links usually appear closer to the genuine search results we are naturally drawn to them rather than the #1 placed link.

Food for thought me thinks…