If you serve a lot of static files from your website you can acheive a healthy speed boost for your visitors as well as offloading the burden of serving up those files by using Amazon Cloudfront to roll your own Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Setting up your own CDN is a three step process and it’s very easy to do. If you have not done so already you need to sign up for an Amazon AWS account and register for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Cloudfront. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter autoresponders and people that use them have been getting a bit of a bad rep recently. I thought I would just add my thoughts on the subject to why I think otherwise. For those who have not experienced a Twitter autoresponder or don’t know what I’m talking about I mean the automated messages you sometimes get when you start following people.

Before I get showered with inevitable flaming I just want to point out that not all uses for twitter autoresponses is good. One of my favourite search marketing blogs is run by the team at @hubspot and they are clear in pointing out that Twitter is a great inbound marketing tool but it also a permissive medium.

This brings me on to my first gripe, if you DM me just for following and include a link in your message this is not permissive. As with many other twitterites don’t be surprised if I stop following you. If your primary reason for opening a twitter account was to spam followers with marketing bullshit and pushing links on us you will not last long on the twittersphere. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had an Acer Aspire One for quite some time now but have yet to write anything about it. In fact I was one of the stupid few who rushed out on UK launch day to make sure I had one of those dinky little netbooks, only to find out a few days later the retail price would drop by over 20%. Lesson learned.

To be honest I was a little underwhelmed by the One at first with it’s restrictive operating system, totally locked down interface and very little information on hand to make it perform as it should. However the biggest dissappointment with the One was the lack of support for 3G modems.

I’ve been a 3 mobile internet user for about 9 months now, it’s a handy little device especially while commuting on the train much like the Aspire One. Finally it would seem Acer have pulled their finger out and got the two to work hand in hand. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be so here is how i did it: Read the rest of this entry »