We use Amazon S3 at PRX for images and more importantly all our audio files. We love it.
What we really want to do is use EC2 - look at the gigavox success story on amazon’s site - we need almost the same things, and want to implement almost the same arch - except using rails and activemessaging.
The problem is the EC2 closed beta - ugh - we’ve been waiting, oh so impatiently. In the meantime everyone shuold go get their feet wet with RightScale. You get 10 hours to play with, even without your own EC2 keys.
comatose is a lovely terse cms that you can integrate into a web application - unlike other rails cms systems which are the application. Thing is, terse is great until you need something it does not do.
At PRX we wanted to be able to upload/resize/attach images and files, have a preview mode to see what the home page would look like before we publish parts of the content, and also we wanted to be able to access session info so we could make some content vary based on info in a user’s session (this is also part of how the ‘preview’ mode works).
Folks on the forums also seem to be trying to figure this kind of thing out, so I humbly offer what I have gotten to work.
So without exposing all the work I am cleaning up on extending comatose, here is a bit of code showing how to add the session info to the comatose pages so it can be accessed and used.
As for the rest of my enhancements - well, I need to make it into a plugin I think, that gets installed on top of comatose. That will have to wait, as I am too busy adding enhancements at the moment to stop and package it….
Weekend America has a segment this week, and a spot on their home page, about the public radio talent quest. Bill Radke interviews Jake Shapiro about the contest, and what it’ll take to win.
NY Times has some coverage today on the Talent Quest Competition that PRX has undertaken with a grant from CPB.
Contest opens April 16th - be or pick the next Ira Glass!
Have a look, there’s also a very short prez I gave at the IMA 2007 Conference showing how we use S3, ActiveMq, Rails, ActiveMessaging and other junk like that to make our systems hum.