>> You're allowed to have special characters in object names?
> 
> Define "special".  Sure, I think you can have most any unicode character 
> you want in a name. There might be a handful you can't, but slash isn't 
> one of them. Indeed, slash is in *most* of the names, because the tools 
> that deal with heirarchical names assumes that.

Looking at the protocol-level implementation, I'm guessing you can't 
include newline characters in an object key. ;-)

>> But also the interface that allows me, the blog owner, to add new blog 
>> entries without logging into the virtual server over SSH and manually 
>> editing half a dozen HTML pages. (And, ideally, convert my custom 
>> markup into valid HTML.)
> 
> That's what offline processing is for. :-)  Make the changes locally, 
> run your script that turns them into valid HTML, and post any changes up 
> to S3. Run the CGI script on your own machine at home and do the same. 
> (Doesn't the URL for posts let you specify something to go as a mailto 
> without human interaction? It's been so long since I had to worry about 
> not actually having a server running.....)

Yeah, you can do it with offline processing. But I found that when I did 
it that way, I almost *never* posted any blog entries. It was just too 
much effort to add a source file, run the processing tool, run a 
seperate tool that zips up the changed files, log in to my host, upload 
the zip file, unzip it over the WWWroot folder...

Currently I have a real blog interface. I can update my blog from any 
PC, anywhere on the Internet, without any special tools. The only 
problem is that it's 100% non-compliant as far as standards go. Oh, and 
buggy as hell! (It keeps "eating" my formatting instructions... and the 
CSS eats bullets.)

>> Unless you mean that ranting 20 quad-core virtual machines for a day 
>> is cheaper than *buying* a renderfarm?
> 
> Exactly.

Hmm. I still don't think I can afford that, so it's kinda moot.

>> Right. Because sending an email is way easier than scripting 
>> VirtualDub. Oh, wait - no it isn't. :-P
> 
> Sure it is, if you have things configured properly.
> 
> Admittedly, getting the mail to come out at your ISP without the 
> firewall etc getting in the way is tricky sometimes.  Spam has made most 
> ISPs really lock down their servers.

Er, yeah. This is the problem part. It is almost impossible to get any 
SMTP server on earth to accept inbound SMTP messages. I've tried.

>> Perhaps you can answer a small question for me then: It seems simple 
>> enough how a random dude like me can sign up and start using AWS. But 
>> what if you're trying to use it for commercial purposes? How does 
>> giving multiple administrators control over the system work?
> 
> The same as if its your own machine.  You create multiple logins, give 
> each a different SSH key, and let people log in that way.

How about S3 though? From the looks of it, I can set up my own AWS 
account, and then I can upload content. But what if you have a team of 
devs producing content that you want to upload? Do you really have to 
give them all the root password to do that? (This appears to violate the 
AWS AUP.)

>> Of course, you get charged money for performing backups. ;-)
> 
> No, but you get charged money for holding on to backups. Data from EC2 
> to S3 is free, last I looked.

Oh *God*, I've lost track of which transfers are free and which ones get 
charged at both friggin' ends. E.g., traffic from SQS to EC2 US is free, 
but from SQS to EC2 EU is chargable one-way.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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