These bills have the ability to cause catastrophic damage to the way we currently use the internet today and could potentially stop progress and innovation. If either SOPA or PIPA were law these sites would have been closed or gone bankrupt before becoming part of our lives today.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• MySpace
• eBay
• Craigslist
• Twitpic
• WordPress.com
• and countless others.

First things first, S3 is just storage. When creating your ‘bucket’ (we will talk about that in a bit), you select the location in which it will be stored. S3 isn’t a content delivery network (CDN), but Amazon does offer that with Cloudfront. Even though this isn’t a CDN, it will probably speed up your website as well as reduce burden on your web host, only costing you a couple cents a month (depending on your audience).

1. Sign up for Amazon Web Services

This is fairly easy, it even uses your existing Amazon account if you have one. Just go to Amazon Web Services and click Sign-Up.

2. Creating the Bucket

Once you have signed up for your AWS account you can create a bucket for your files to be stored in. This is fairly painless. Just log into your account and go to the AWS Management Console. Once your on the console page, just click on the Amazon S3 tab and click ‘Create Bucket’. You can name the bucket anything you want, but I named mine shinyidol. Best to name it something that makes sense as it will be the name in your S3 url, so mine ended up being shinyidol.s3.amazonaws.com. The second option is the region in which you want the files to be stored. There are multiple options depending on what region of the globe you live in or where you think your traffic comes from. You have now created your bucket.

3. Time to Install WordPress Plugins

There are a couple WordPress plugins that come in very handy optimizing your content to move to S3, moving the actual content, and use moving forward on new posts.

Optimize your content with WP Smush.it. This really has nothing to do with S3, but really just optimizing all your images before you move them to the new server. It is super easy to use, and even has a bulk Smush.It. You will probably see a 20% savings on your file sizes.

Move your content with W3 Total Cache. This is an amazing tool to help your site load faster, but we really are only using one feature in it, which copies the media library, wp-includes/ files, and host theme files to your S3 bucket.

Just download and install the W3 Total Cache plugin. Once enabled click on General and scroll down. You will have an option to turn on CDN. Just click the check box to enable, and select Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) from the drop-down, and click Save all settings.

Now you have to tell it what account to copy the files too. Click on CDN in W3 Total Cache. From this screen we have two options, configuration of the S3 account with our WordPress site, and the tools that allow us to copy files to the S3 bucket. Configuration is simple, you will need your Access Key ID and Secret Key from Amazon, both can be found by logging into your AWS account and selecting Security Credentials from the My Account / Console button. Just copy and paste the Access Key ID and Secret Key, type in the name of the bucket you created previously, and leave SSL Support to Auto. Once you have those set, just click Test S3 Upload, and after a couple seconds it will say Test Passed and now your can click Save all settings.

Now that we have WordPress and our S3 bucket talking to each other we can start copying content to the bucket. W3 Total Cache makes this easy by giving you a tool that just copies everything for you and creates folders in your bucket. In the CDN options you can select what items you want to upload to S3. Just click one of the various options and a popup will appear with the total files it will export to S3. Just click start and your off! This could take a couple minutes depending on how many files you have in your library. Once that is done you can also move other files such as wp-include files and theme associated files. What makes this tool so handy is it also updates all your posts to point to the S3 files. So you don’t have to update anything in previous posts.

The last plugin is Amazon S3 for WordPress with CloudFront. This plugin lets you upload directly to your S3 bucket and you get a fancy new icon next to your Media Library button. You use just the same way as you would uploading any other files previously.

Well there you have it. You should now have all your major media files on S3 at this point. You can run some tests via Pingdom to check your load times. I reduced my page loads from the 10 seconds range to 3 seconds, but also push all the heavy lifting off my shared host.

Application Management in Zune Desktop

While updating to NoDo I had to hard reset my phone, losing all my data including my photos and apps. Zune does a great job syncing your photos, but applications aren’t synced and there isn’t any way to sync them. After getting my phone running I tried to download the typical first apps (Facebook, Twitter, ESPN ScoreCenter) in Zune Desktop and was alerted that I have already downloaded them, being forced to download all my updates via my phones WiFi connection. While this isn’t such a drag, it would have been nice to just click a couple download links in Zune Desktop and copy them over via USB. Also as users download more and more apps, it will become increasingly more difficult to keep track of what you have or haven’t bought if all app management can only be done on the phone.

Better YouTube App

Netflix is great, but I don’t watch movies on my phone. I show people silly clips of my dog on YouTube. While this will (should) improve greatly with the HTML5 broswer, it would be nice to just have an app that works and doesn’t just take you to the mobile site. Hopefully Microsoft and Google can be nice enough to release an awesome YouTube app that also allows video uploads from WiFi.

Smart DJ for Zune

I was sold on the Zune Pass after my trial was over. Having access to tons of music with the free credits is a pretty awesome deal, but I’d really like the phone to have Smart DJ. It is great for finding new artists and when I’m in the car on a long trip, it would be awesome for the phone to switch tracks up based on what you are listening too.

Save User Settings for the Camera

I’m sure all WP7 users know that the camera application resets every time it opens is a feature, but it is an awful feature. MS should really just allow the user to save a settings profile.

Battery Percentage

This might sound minor, but I like numbers. I want exact.

These are all minor things, but I’d really like to see them work these issues out. Most of these issues are just in how the phone works. I could do a whole second post on improvements in some of the applications I have been using. Perhaps another time.