My public and private cloud experience
## So – I lost some images…
Today I had to do some errands, one of which included me going to a car wash. It was more than just a simple wash – it was the first wash of my wife’s 1.5 year old car. Yeah – that’s not good, but it is what it is. Naturally, that wash took some time \(and money\). During the wait, I fired up my MacBook 11.6″ \(weee!!!\). I looked and saw that there was no open wifi around. But not to fear, I whipped out my trusty clear hotspot. In a manner of a few minutes, I’m settled and I start doing today’s stuff.
Today’s stuff happened to be an update my daughter’s lacrosse website ([rhsgirlslax](http://rhsgirlslax.com/ “RHS Lax”)). I had to put some of the sponsor images on the website via a pretty cool WordPress plugin called [Ad Squares Widget](http://www.primothemes.com/ “Ad Squares”). It felt good to be happily resizing images, redoing some of the logos so they would fit, etc on a really small form factor computer. Definitely something I could not have done (well easily) on an iPad. Anywho, about halfway through the mini project, I noticed that the plugin had been updated. WordPress does a nice job of notifying you about this. So – not thinking twice about it, I told wordpress to go ahead and update the plugin. While it was doing that, I finished fixing the code for the plugin and then added all the URL’s to the adds into the widget. But, when I went to reload the site, none of my images worked. A serious WTF moment later and some digging showed me what should have been pretty evident all along. The example code from the plugin places the images in the folder with the plugin. I did that. Well – when you update the plugin, it doesn’t update the directories and files – it replaces them! BAM! All my images were gone.
No big deal, right? Just upload them to the server again and poof. Well, that wasn’t so easy. The 11″ MBA just came into duty and all I had was the images that I was working on that day (got them from my email). Well – the good news is that the iMac that had those images was at home. A quick ssh to my home server and a hop over to the iMac and I was there. Then I ran into a simple problem: how do I efficiently transfer those files back to my 11″. That’s when Dropbox did a double whami AHA! on me. A quick “mv rhsimages ~/Dropbox” later they were in the cloud and seconds later on the 11″. Wee!!
It gets better. I serve the website from my home server via my DSL line that has a relatively meager 750Kb/s uplink. It works well for most things, but it sure isn’t enough to quickly serve something with tons of images. Well Dropbox, has this public folder thing. If you want, you can generate a URL to any file in that folder. So rather than copying those images back to my server, I left them on Dropbox and grabbed the public URL. I used that in the Ad Squares page and now my daughter’s site is being served a zillion times faster.
So – what is this then? I like to think of it as my cloud migration experiment. I’m doing a blend of private (my vmware farm with the web server) and public (Dropbox) clouds to do something better. How about that.
Tags: cloud, clouds, dropbox