S3, or Simple Storage Service, is Amazon’s cheap cloud data storage system. Michael Martin, the author of the tutorial, says that his bill from last month was $2.60. ($0.15 per month per GB for stored, $0.15 per GB transferred.) Using a backup script on your server, you can automatically archive and encrypt your files and MySQL dumps, then send them off to Amazon’s servers for safekeeping.

I should start by saying that while s3 is not a free service, it’s incredibly inexpensive! My bill for the last month was $2.60, and that was with backing up a lot more than just this site! It’s the cheapest peace-of-mind ever.

Automatic Amazon S3 Backups on Ubuntu/Debian [Pro Blog Design]

Ars Technica’s Editor-in-Chief, Ken Fisher, recently penned Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love, a piece that presents, quite well, the facts of what ad blocking does to a website.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising.

Whether you block ads or not, I encourage you to read the full article. Even if you think you have made-up your mind on the matter, you should still see what the editor of one of the largest (and highest-quality) tech news sites has to say.

When someone blocks ads on a website they frequent, they are taking money from a company that has to somehow pay its employees and provide funds to run servers. It may not be a pleasant fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t relish the idea of paying subscriptions for websites.

I don’t ask that you give-up ad blocking entirely. (After all, how would we have survived the pop-up infestation of the ’90s without resorting to blocking them?) I do, however, encourage the adoption of less aggressive blocking rules, and that you whitelist your favorite sites.

One of the first things I noticed was that the sites’ advertisement strategy seems to have been rethought. There are no more large leaderboard or 250×250 banners; instead, there are only 125×125 banners. They sit at the top of the narrow sidebar and run down the side of the page in a single column. It actually looks pretty good. They’re out of the way, yet still visible enough to be sought after by potential advertisers.

Overall the UI has been cleaned up, particularly the post footers and comment functions. I particularly like the icon-based “Related Posts” section, with the word bubbles that display the titles when you mouse over them. The “fold” effect on the premium membership box is kind of neat too, despite the fact that it’s becoming too much of a trend lately.

Overall, I would say the new design turned out very well, as is usual for Envato.

Perhaps more than the redesign, I am interested in one of their announcements: “Mobiletuts+,” which will be a tutorial blog “all about mobile development.” If that means it will include iPhone application development tutorials, I will be impatiently monitoring Twitter for the launch.

Dayta is designed to help you log any sort of data set that you wish to track over time. How many miles do you drive between refilling your gas tank? How much money did you spend on iPhone apps last month? Is your World of WarCraft guild improving its raid success ratio? You can create a Dayta log for anything.

You can recall data points by date, or view them on a graph. The charts Dayta generates are simple, and much like Google Analytics in style.

Inputting data is one area that confuses new users frequently. The default input field is a number that you can increase or decrease by tapping a simple plus or minus icons. The figure is committed to the log by pressing the number itself. But what if you need to enter a larger number, like 216, or something with a decimal point? It took me a little bit too long to have the “duh” moment… If you swipe your finger from right to left, across the input area, it will slide to show a text input with a numerical keypad.

Your various logs are displayed on a Dashboard screen, complete with sparklines next to each log’s name. They can be sorted into folders, too, so things don’t get too cluttered, as would likely happen for stat addicts.

Dayta is a great, and well-designed, application. It’s well worth the $0.99 cost.

Dayta icon and screenshots copyright Sahil Lavingia.

Google supports a few microformats in their search results. vCard data can be displayed in some cases, upcoming events can be shown for theaters and event centers, star ratings can be displayed for reviews, etc..

Joost de Valk has put together a tutorial on how to add the hreview microformat to your WordPress site, giving Google the option to show your editorial ratings on SERPs for any products you may review. I’ve implemented it over at Fantasy Folder, as I often write book reviews there, and I had been planning on adding editorial star ratings anyway.

In his previous post here on Yoast, Frederick explained why you should use Microformats to increase the CTR from Google. In the comments of that post, people were asking if there are plugins to easily implement this in your theme. While those are probably a bit hard to do, I though it would be good to explain how I implemented hreview in my theme.

Implementing hreview in your WordPress theme [Yoast]

The applications included aren’t necessarily as impressive as those from previous bundles, but there are some good ones.

If you ever need to backup a DVD, RipIt has replaced the difficult to obtain “Mac the Ripper” as the most prominent solution. It’s very simple to use, and it works with pretty much any disc you can throw at it. It’s usually $20 or so when your trial period is ends, so the MacHeist bundle is a pretty good value if you’re already looking for a good DVD ripping application. I haven’t tried out all of the other apps yet, but the clipboard enhancer Clips and the CoverScout album artwork-finder sound like they might be useful.

Oh, and one of the software packages included is Tales of Monkey Island, the latest installment in the infamous Monkey Island series of video games. As usual, don’t worry about the fact that it and RapidWeaver are not “unlocked” yet; they will be.

Over the past few months we’ve been preparing for this celebration by sliding new hypervisors into place with an additional 50% in RAM – and now VPS.NET*is happy to announce that this week we will be increasing the RAM per node – every VPS.NET node for both current clients and new signups will go from 256MB to 375MB per node – every node will also receive an additional 200MHz in CPU (600Mhz per node). This is all given to you at absolutely NO cost.

No worries – we’re still not overselling. . It’s taken a few months (and we’ve somehow stayed quiet on this!) but we’re finally almost ready to roll these upgrades out to you.

For those of you who haven’t heard of VPS.net, they take a “cloud” approach to managing their Virtual Machines. A VPS can consist of as many (or as little) “nodes” as you wish, a node representing a fixed unit of computing power. As your needs grow, you can instantly order and activate new nodes, and your VM dynamically expands. A 119MB increase in RAM per node is a very welcome bonus.

Happy birthday, and keep up the good work, VPS.net!

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

It sounds to me like they just patented a fairly obvious mechanism that has been long used by sites like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, RSS readers, blogs, etc..

Am I the only one who isn’t okay with this sort of patent-trolling behavior? Why does the USPTO keep letting these kinds of application through? It’s bad enough that Amazon is still fighting to have their one-click buying patent approved, and now we have another stupid patent that is just too obvious. Facebook is by no means the first website to have a “news feed,” and the idea is hardly patent-worthy.

Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them? [TheNextWeb]