Qbrushes using Amazon S3

wondering what S3 is?. S3 is Amazons Simple Storage service it allows people to take advantage of Amazons powerful network of severs for a small fee in return.

Using S3 was important for qbrushes because the amount of bandwidth and file serving could probably bring my small hosting account to its knees. so now that I’ve managed to set it up, i have a few tips to share with anyone that is looking into it.

How to Get started

this  tutorial from nettuts.com will show you how to setup Amazons S3 account with Firefox addon called S3fox organiser.

S3 with Wordpress

Most people don’t know about this excellent plugin by tantannoodles.com,it allows you to easily access S3 from within your Post and also automatically sets up domain friendly URL’s  without you having to mess with the CNAME Alias. example instead of an ugly URL of

https://s3.amazonaws.com/qbrushes/image.jpg
You get
http://qbrushes.s3.amazonaws.com/image.jpg

Firefox 3 Beta Addon

all the firefox S3 add-ons that i tried failed to work with ff3 beta except s3:// 0.03. unfortunately its features are so lacking that i would advise using a standalone program instead.

S3 Standalone Manager

there are quite a few of S3 managers out there the one i currently use is S3Safe, its shareware but so far there isn’t any indication of it expiring any time soon.

for a more extended look into other S3 Tools check out this great article.