Archives For Amazon

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As you may have seen, Amazon announced their new lineup of Kindles today, from the $79 base version to the $199 Kindle Fire, a rival to Apple’s iPad. One thing that piqued my interest about the Kindle Fire is that it includes a new, custom Web browser, named Silk. Amazon posted an introduction to Silk, along with a six-minute video, on their site today, too. A lot on that page and in the video is marketing hype, but they raise some interesting points about the fact that Web browsers are fundamentally the same as they were 15 years ago, and aren’t ideal for today’s use, especially with all the mobile devices. Now the solution they came up with seems to be something akin to a reverse CDN: Whereas a CDN takes the load off of one server and shares it across a network of servers, Amazon Silk uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reduce the load on the device. From just what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like they’ve addressed a problem with browsers, but rather with the HTTP protocol, introducing their own gateway to improve the communications. It’ll be interesting to see what impact this new approach has, and how, if at all, it affects Web development in the years to come.

Oh, and it may be time for me to buy a new gizmo!

In January of 2011, the third full month after putting this site online, there were roughly 450,000 page views requiring 27GB of bandwidth (i.e., mostly data provided by the server to users). In April of 2011, there were also 450,000 page views, but only 14GB of bandwidth. That’s a dramatic difference: half the bandwidth for virtually the same amount of traffic! This wasn’t a goal of mine (my hosting plan allows for up to 1TB of bandwidth per month), but happens to be a great side benefit of three steps I took, primarily with the aim of improving the site’s performance (i.e., how quickly pages load for visitors). Here’s the full scoop… Continue Reading…

I’m in the process of implementing Amazon’s CloudFront as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for my site (in order to improve performance). Once I feel comfortable with how it’s working (it seems to be now, but it will take a day or two to fully roll out), I’ll formally write up what I did and why. In the meantime, if you see anything crazy, please let me know.

Through Amazon’s Author Connect service, Amazon.com now has a “home page” for my work. Right now, my author page there lists all of my books, has my bibliography, and displays the feed for this blog (which means, in a circular connection, this post about Amazon’s service will show up there, too). In time Amazon plans on adding more features. This doesn’t really affect me much, although if it helps people find my work, all the better. The best thing for me is that I no longer have to maintain two blogs: my own and one at Amazon.