I was looking to increase my experience working with large scalable websites, so I decided to switch all of my static items such as images over to Amazon S3 and CloudFront. S3 is Amazon’s storage service and CloudFront is their content delivery service. By doing this, I get to take advantage of the same infrastructure Amazon uses to run their websites.

From Amazon’s website:

This means that I get to upload my website’s images to Amazon’s S3. Then, when a user accesses this website, Amazon CloudFront delivers these images to the nearest edge location of that user. CloudFront stores these images in the edge’s cache until it expires. read more »

One of the best communication tools on the Internet today for both individuals and businesses is Twitter.com. Twitter is a short form communication tool that allows you to post a message of 140 characters or less. As a member of Twitter, I can follow other users and view their updates. How does this benefit individuals or businesses? A lot of very interesting individuals are on Twitter. One way for an individual to benefit from Twitter is to use the service as a way to keep their followers updated on the latest news about themselves. You can point followers to recent blog posts or even to your latest project. Another example is Dell. Dell uses the service to keep their customers updated on the latest discounts for their products. Twitter is a great way for both individuals and businesses to leverage their brand equity.

This article will explain how to easily add your Twitter updates to your Drupal site. We will add the code provided by Twitter to a Drupal block, and then use CSS to style the block to fit our site. Our finished product will look like this: read more »