Amazon CloudFront is one of the cheaper CDNs, but many people worry about it’s seemingly complicated pricing scheme. Since you pay for what you use, your monthly bill is calculated based on how many gigabytes of data you transfer and how many HTTP requests are made.

You pay $0.0075 for every 10,000 HTTP requests, and $0.12 per gigabyte for North American and European visitors. The cost-per gigabyte is slightly higher for other regions, but it doesn’t go over $0.25/GB.

So how much do you end up paying for a blog with around 40,000 page views per month? $0.64.

I’ve been running CloudFront for a little while now, and I ended up paying about sixty-four cents from the 3.004GB of transfer incurred over the month of February. It’s definitely affordable, and should help take some load off your server, besides decreasing load times.

Alex King and his company Crowd Favorite have a proposed solution. Their plugin adds a really nice UI to the New Post screen, with tabs that appear depending on which Post Formats your theme enables and different input fields that change depending on which tab is selected.

In addition to the way cool plugin, they have a sensible naming convention for custom fields to go along with it. I think it would great if the Core team adopted that as a recommendation for theme developers, and incorporated the UI plugin into WordPress proper.

Alex King did say, back in November, that he planned to suggest it to the Core developers once WordPress 3.3 shipped, so keep your fingers crossed.

WordPress Post Formats Admin UI [Alex King]

A “learning curve” is a visual device used to illustrate the average rate of learning for a skill or tool. Essentially, it is a line chart that shows the learner’s level of proficiency and how it changes over time.

Take a look at the two following charts. The first one illustrates a steep learning curve, while the second shows a more gradual slope. If you take a look at the labels on the axes, you’ll note that the steep curve shows the “knowledge” unit is increasing at a faster rate. That means something with a steep learning curve is easier than something with a gradual slope. Make sense?

I know I’ve been guilty of misusing this term in the past, but have been making an effort to avoid it more recently. It’s a good thing to word around when you’re writing, as using it in the correct context is likely to do nothing but cause confusion at this point. (At least, for general audiences. Depending on your niche, your readers might understand.)

A fancy new one-page website has been circulating Twitter and Reddit of late, serving as an easy into to Git. Git: The Simple Guide helps you install the software, create a repository on your local computer or check out an existing remote one, and start using Git.

It’s a good tutorial, and the design looks great. I like the differently-colored segments with the large text and rounded styling on the <code> elements. (The page is actually hosted on GitHub Pages, which seems fitting, given the subject.)

Many of the elements don’t look quite like Facebook’s, especially the form fields, but they’re close enough that the average user won’t notice. The modal boxes have one of the closest adaptations.

Fbootstrapp [GitHub]

While it does make sense to pay for a tool if you use it extensively for commercial purposes, you may not be ready to if you’re an indie developer just beginning a project that won’t hit the shelves for awhile. Also, if you’re using it for versioning and deploying websites, you may not want to have all of your source be public.

GitHub’s business model is primarily the sale of premium accounts with varying numbers of allowed private repositories, starting at $7/month for five private repositories and up to one collaborator. It’s not a bad deal at all, as GitHub is by and large open source projects, but you may still want to find a better offer. Fortunately, there are a couple of solid competitors.

BitBucket

BitBucket is very much like GitHub, functionally. It has the same sort of social collaboration tools, and most of the same features. But that’s where the differences end. Their pricing scheme is to give you all of the repositories you could possibly want, both public and private, while charging to add extra collaborators to your private repositories. You get five for free, and can upgrade to ten for $10/month, twenty-five for $20/month, etc.. Oh, and they support both Git and Mercurial.

I’ve been using BitBucket lately for some of my projects, and it’s been great so far.

Beanstalk

Beanstalk only does private repositories, offering plans limited by disk space and the number of repositories, as well as the number of authorized users. Aside from their 100MB single-repository trial plan, their offerings start at $15/month for 3GB of space, 10 repositories and 5 users. One of their unique selling points is their integration with tools like Basecamp and Lighthouse. They also have quite a few corporate customers.

This is great for two scenarios. You can use it to experiment with a bit of CSS or JavaScript for brainstorming purposes, or you can use it if you need to ask someone for help. (It’s a lot easier to figure out what’s going wrong with someone’s code or markup if you can jump right in and start messing with the code.) Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks) uses it all the time to show off CSS experiments that will likely be used in future posts of his.

Anyway, now’s the time when I usually do my annual rundown of statistics and the best (or most newsworthy) posts from each month of the year.

• Monthly Page Views: 39,286
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 29,568
• RSS Subscribers: 662 (average over 30 days)
• Toolbar PageRank: 5
• Approved Comments: 3,554
• Akismet Spam Comments Blocked (to date): 533,824
• Legit Comments to Spam Ratio: ~1:150
• Total Tweets: 8,609

(Monthly statistics as of December 31, 2011.)

January

• Mac App Store Launches…Along With Tweetie 2 for Mac
• What Everyone Missed About the Gawker Password Scandal
• The iPhone Comes to Verizon — For Real This Time
• AOL Hijacks WoW.com Domain From WoW Insider

February

• Metered Internet Comes to Canada
• TestFlight: iOS Beta Testing on the Fly
• Sparrow: The New Mail for Mac

March

• Cult of Mac Caught in Google Content Farm Crossfire
• Variable-length Argument Lists in PHP with func_get_args()
• Evil JavaScript Trick: The History Nuker

April

• Syncing Content With HTML5 Video or Audio
• Tempo: A Tiny JSON Templating Engine

May

• Rackspace is Shutting Down Slicehost
• Tumblr-style Links with WordPress Post Formats
• Angry Birds Comes to the Web, in HTML5
• What if PHP were Completely Rewritten to be More Elegant?
• So I Finally Figured Out Why Everyone Likes Git Repositories so Much…

June

• Lions and iClouds and iOS 5: WWDC 2011 Roundup
• WPTavern is Back: New Owner, Same Great Flavor
• How to Defeat Cyrillic Spam in WordPress
• Get Twitter and Facebook Link Statistics with JSON and jQuery
• Don’t Assume a User’s Browser Window Size

July

• Where to Find Free Fonts for CSS @font-face
• Easy CSS Sprites with Sprite Cow
• Adding and Tracking Social Buttons
• Minimus: The OS X JavaScript and CSS Minifier

August

• Getting Your Feet Wet with PDO and Migrating Old MySQL Code
• 5 Sites to Find Free PSD Resources for Your Web Designs
• Disable Domain Highlighting in Firefox
• Google Launches Page Speed Service
• If PHP Were British
• WordPress Admins Can Post JavaScript in Post Comments

September

• Bootstrap: Twitter’s CSS Framework
• Prefixr: Cross-Browser CSS in Seconds
• How to Add A Floating Social Media Widget Box to Your Blog
• How to Import a Very Large SQL Dump with phpMyAdmin
• How to Bring Back “http://” in Firefox 7

October

• The W3C Has Released the First Working Draft of CSS4
• Building an iPhone App to Parse the Twitter API with NSXMLParser

November

• Create Color Palettes With ColorSchemer Touch
• Using Google-Hosted jQuery With a Local Fallback
• Awesome Firebug Tricks You May Have Missed

December

• Domain Hijackers Hit Design and Development Blogs
• Twitter Launches “New New Twitter” and Ruins iOS App
• Universal Censors Podcast on YouTube for Mentioning Megaupload Music Video Takedown
• Easily Embed Whole Tweets in Your Blog Posts With Tweetable 1.2.4
• Despite Boycott, GoDaddy Still Supports SOPA

I hope you will all continue reading through 2012. Happy new year!