Last year, there were 2,000 photos in my Flickr photostream. And few days ago, I just noticed that I’ve been uploading another 2,000+ photos. So far, I’m satisfied with Flickr service — at least, I never experienced bad service. I bought a new camera few months ago (Canon EOS 450D), and I took more photos using it. The “problem” was that I don’t have too much time to upload many selected photos. This month, I decided to stop my other internet connection — yes, I use two internet providers in the last few months. The reason was simple: it was because I had to cut my internet budget.

I had no problem with my internet connection backup. In fact, I’m really satisfied with the upload speed. The upload speed also helped me working with my videoblog. Right now, I think I consider upload an download speed as “okay”. It’s not super fast. It’s okay. So, I need to be more patient dealing with uploading activity now. I’m using Telkom Speedy now.

Back to Flickr, I just realize that I need to work on the photo “sets” and “collections” management. Right now, I don’t have any “collections” for all my 4,000+ photos. All photos are managed only in “sets”. I’m still finding the best way to manage them.

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Now email subject is something like: [Flickr] New items from {his/her name}. This is more useful because I can see who just uploaded the photos. Information delivered in the email is similar with the previous one, anyway.

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And, meet the new logo below.

There are new philosophies, meaning and concepts behind this new logo — of course. But, when I saw it for the first time, I don’t like it that much. The first impression? I don’t know. Anyway, congratulation Telkom for your new logo. I hope you improve your service.

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1. Email-friendly, of course

One of the internet feature I regularly check is email inbox. Sometime, I want to post something directly from email sent into my inbox. Posterous is about working directly from the email — web-based email or email clients.

2. Free

It’s a free service. Right now, I have 1 GB of free storage. Since it does not offer types of account (free or paid account), Posterous said that we can have more than 1 GB if we hit the limit. If I have to pay to get more storage or features, I will consider to subscribe. But, I hope it offers the right price/package. And, we can have multiple Posterous sites using a single email address.

3. Autopost

How many social media accounts I have? How to distribute or send something to those service easily — if I want to share something using those services? The autopost feature is just perfect. I can send photos to Flickr, send videos to YouTube, post something to my own blog. But, I can do them all automagically from Posterous. And, I can choose whether I want to share them directly or not. Or, I can share only to specific targets.

4. Send and relax

I don’t have to be bothered with editing or customization process like resizing images, upload media files and embed them to my own blog (if I have a self-hosted blog). Posterous handles all emails sent properly. I sent multiple images, they will be displayed as a gallery-like entry. I send an audio files, it will have an embed audio player. For videos sent, they will be displayed in a video player. I sent a YouTube link, it will be transcoded into an embed player. So, it’s like send and forget.

5. Smart file handling

It’s related to the above reason. Posterous works together — in term of cross-service — with other online services. For example, we can automatically send PDF documents directly to Scribd, but not to my Flickr page. Posterous will recognize uploaded files — as long as we integrate Scribd with our Posterous account.

6. Personalized domain/website address

I can have a personalized domain for my Posteorus page. Right now, my Posterous site is posterous.orangescale.net. So, every photos/images/articles I sent to Posterous will have permanent link with my own domain.

7. Themeable

If I don’t like the default Posterous site design, I can choose from the available themes, customize them or even create my own theme. There are some limitation, for example we can include JavaScript codes inside our theme or PHP syntax. But, even with the basic theme tags, it should be more than enough — for me. I’m using a customized Posterous site design now.

8. Multiple authors and emails

This will be useful for a collaborative site. For example, a group of people want to report something together — from different locations. They can have their own email addresses added to a Posterous-powered site and all emails sent from those addresses to Posterous will go to one  (or multiple) Posterous site(s). It depends on the settings.

9. Subscriptions to email

I subscribe to some Posterous sites, and one thing I like about this is that I can have updates from subscribed site delivered into my inbox. Or, I can simply read them from the subscription page.

10. I have 9 reasons above :)

The last reasons, I found many useful features I need for now as I mentioned above. Or, this last reason is to complete the list, since I’ve mentioned “10 reasons” in the title? Well, having 9 good reasons is just more than enough. :)

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Few weeks ago, I posted a question about media/image sharing provider as Twitter companion. I asked about the better solution between TwitPic or TweetPhoto. Andre Siregar (@dregar) mentioned about using Posterous as the image sharing provider. Right now, I’m enjoying Posterous. Posterous offers many features that are easy to use, especially — of course — when it has something to do with email.

When we share media files (photos/videos) — related to Twitter — the idea is to put the image somewhere in the internet, and broadcast the URL to our Twitter account. Most services offers similar mechanism. And, most of them also have ‘post by email’ feature. Now, I think I will use my Posterous account as my primary service to do this. The main reason is that I like using ’send by email’ feature.

Other reason is about personal preference. Posterous has flexibility on the design. I have made some modifications for my Posterous page. It’s still simple, anyway. Also, Posterous can handle multiple media formats so that it’s not limited to photos/image only, but audio, audio or any other files. If I want to share to Twitter — for example — I can do it easily using Autopost feature, or send it to a certain email address. Nice!

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Feedburner feed tracking

If someone subscribe to your Posterous RSS feed, you can find out how many feed subscribers you have. This process should be easy because you can integrate your feed to Feedburner account. Using this, you can use all Feedburner’s features.

Autopost to Scribd

Posterous offers auto post ability. Using this, you can send your posts from Posterous to different websites/service. If you send a document, you can deliver it directly to Scribd.

Themes and Custom Themes!

If you want to have your own custom look for your Posterous page, you can do it easily now. There are some themes available. Once you select your theme, you can do some modifications  like colors, custom image header, etc. If you’re good at HTML and CSS, and want to create your very own theme, an advanced customization feature is also available. For some people — at least for me — this is a killer feature!

Embed songs from Lala.com and videos from Viddler and Google Video

If you want to embed audio files from Lala.com and videos from Viddler and Google Video, you don’t have to deal with embed codes. Just put the links, and Posterous will do the rest for you.

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These are the mockups of Firefox 3.7 for Windows Vista/7 and XP:

And, this is for Mozilla Firefox 4.0.

More screenshots are available at Mozilla Wiki (Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 theme mockups). About the interface design, I think Opera has a great visual design.

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CloudBerry Explorer makes managing files in Amazon S3 storage EASY. By providing a user interface to Amazon S3 accounts, files, and buckets, CloudBerry lets you manage your files on cloud just as you would on your own local computer. (source)

Now, I want to share how I use CloudBerry S3 Explorer to manage my Amazon S3 Account.

CloudBerry Explorer is availble as a freeware software. We can download it for free. It offers many features we need to manage Amazon S3 account, from a simple to complicated tasks. After I downloaded and installed it, I can start using it. First, I need to add my Amazon S3 account into the application. Go to File > Amazon S3 Accounts.

Fill in the fields there. The “Name” field is used as the account identifier, you can put anything you want there. Put your Access Key and Secret Key to the next two fields. You can get both keys from your Amazon S3 control panel under “Security Credentials” menu.

After that, I can connect to my Amazon S3 account by selecting the account from the menu. Anyway, the account settings can be modified later by going to the account management settings and choose “Edit”.

After that I’m connected to my Amazon S3 account, on the root folder. There’s nothing there — because I haven’t added any buckets there. Hint: The folder on the root directory is a bucket.

Creating Amazon S3 Bucket

To create a new bucket, just click on the “New Bucket” icon. Choose your bucket name wisely. For example, I created a bucket called “orangebox”. After the bucket created, you should check its permission. Right-click on the bucket name, and choose ACL > ACL Settings. If you want you bucket available for everyone (public), just click on the “Public (everyone” button.

Uploading Files

Now, I’m ready to upload my files to my bucket. If you’re familiar with any FTP client, it should be easy. You can drag and drop from the other pane. Every uploaded file has HTTP Header values. More information about HTTP Headers can be read at CloudBerry blog entry. The next question: how to get the link for the uploaded files? Easy. Right-click on the image, and choose “Web URL”.

File Distribution, CloudFront, and Custom Address

Amazon offers an optional service related to S3 (Simple Storage Service) called Amazon CloudFront. If you think Amazon S3 is more than enough, This is optional to use the CloudFront. What is Amazon CloudFront? “In Amazon CloudFront, your objects are organized into distributions. A distribution specifies the location of the original version of your objects. A distribution has a unique CloudFront.net domain name (e.g. abc123.cloudfront.net) that you can use to reference your objects through the network of edge locations.” (source)

In simple definition: Place the files in different location so that users will get the files from the nearest location (shortest route). More details: Distribute Your Content With Amazon CloudFront.

To enable the distribution, you should subscribe to the service. The process is similar like when you subscribe to Amazon S3 service. It’s also using “pay what you use” scenario. So, if you use both services, you will have two billing invoices. Because I’m doing an experiment here, I decided to subscribe to it.

Click on the “Distribution” menu icon to start. Check the “Enable Distribution” checkbox. I want to enable a custom address like: http://orangebox.orangescale.net/photo.jpg — all files under orangebox.orangescale.net will be served by Amazon. So, on the “CNAME” field, I put “orangebox.orangescale.net” (without quotes). Now, I go to my DNS Management — it’s not related to Amazon. And add a CNAME record. If you get the “Web URL”, now you should see options for CNAME values. You need to wait for a moment to get the custom CNAME record fully active.

Anyway, I saw a note about the software. It is said that “Freeware version, Expires on…”. I asked CloudBerry Lab team, and got an answer from Andy of CloudBerry Lab. And, this was his answer:

As for the expiration we want you to stay on the latest and the greatest version of CloudBerry Explorer and that’s why we expire it every once in a while to force you to download the newer version. All you have to do is to go to our website and download a new one. It is still free. All your settings will stay intact. I hope it shed some light on the expiration issue.

So far, I like how CloudBerry Explorer works with my Amazon S3 and CloudFront Explorer account. If you need an application to manage your S3 account, you can try CloudBerry Explorer.

PS: I write this post based on my personal use and understanding about Amazon S3, CloudFront and CloudBerry. CloudBerry Lab does not pay me for this. It’s not a paid review.

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After I signed up for Amazon S3 and CloudFront last week, I started to use it right away. Before that, I tried to get as many information as possible. It seemed easy. I had to deal with some new words like “bucket“, “Access Key ID“, and also “Secret Access Key“.

Amazon S3 — just like its name — is a storage service. What makes it different from “storage” in webhosting is that there is no FTP access. But, the mechanism of “moving your data to a storage server” is similar to FTP. In FTP, we will connect to your server using some basic information like hostname, username and password. In some cases, we will need an FTP port. And we can do it easily using FTP clients like Filezilla, CrossFTP,  WinSCP, etc.

Amazon S3 uses a little bit different process. Just imagine “Access Key ID” as “username”, and “Server Access Key” as the FTP password. Both information are generated by the system and they’re not easy to remember.

Amazon S3 Bucket

To keep our files and folders organized, we can separate your files into different folders. The word “bucket” is like the same with “folder”. The folders in root directory of your Amazon S3 are the buckets. But, those folders have some different behavior. Here are some details before we create our buckets:

• Bucket names can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, periods and dashes. And, they should be started with a letter or number.
• Bucket names must be at least 3 characters long.
• Bucket names can not be in an IP address style. For example, you can’t have 192.168.0.1 as your bucket name.
• Bucket names can’t be renamed.
• You can only create 100 buckets in your Amazon S3 account.

If we put your “picture.jpg” in “bucketname“, we can access your file using http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/picture.jpg or http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/picture.jpg. More details about Amazon S3 bucket can be found at the documentation page.

Upload files to Amazon S3 account

We have an Amazon S3 account, an access key, and secret access key. The first thing we need to do is to find tools to upload/transfer our files. There are many applications we can use, here are some:

• S3Fox Organizer — This is for those who work with Mozilla Firefox browser. This addon will help us with our S3 account.
• CloudBerry S3 Explorer — An application we can install to our computer. It’s a freeware application by CloudBerry Lab.

Those are two tools I have right now, you can find your favorite tools. So far, they just work great. Useful! The first thing we need to do is creating a new bucket. After that, check its permission. To have your buckets accessible for everyone you need to modify its ACL (Access Control List).

I only use a basic setting. I everyone can open all files under a certain bucket. So, I give everyone a “read” permission. We can modify the access list at any time, not only for the bucket but also for other folders and files under it.

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Here are some screenshots (click to enlarge):

And, enjoy this Opera Mini 5 Beta Reviewers Guide video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joBaCW8abNE[/youtube]

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