Amazon’s S3 storage service appears to be down. CenterNetworks images are broken because of it and I had to move the style sheet back so the site at least renders correctly. Sites like Twitter have massive broken images currently because Amazon S3 is down.

We will keep updating this post until the service has recovered. As of Noon Eastern time, the S3 service is down.

Amazon’s S3 service was also down this past February and Amazon explained the reasons for the outage and downtime a few days later. There has to be a way to failover when S3 is down.

As always report in if you are having issues with Amazon S3.

Update: Amazon S3 clients are now posting outage messages on the forums. It appears EC2 is working ok.

Update 2: Amazon is now reporting on their health dashboard that Amazon S3 has "elevated error rates".

Update 3 - 12:55pm: Now down over an hour, Amazon says they are "pursuing several paths of corrective action. Sites affected include SmugMug and Twitter. Twitter is up with no images while SmugMug had to take the service down since so much of it relies on Amazon’s services.

Update 4 - 1:55pm: Amazon now reporting, "10:33 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated."

Update 5 - 3:45pm: We are now down over 3.5 hours - Amazon’s latest update, "12:25 PM PDT We have restored communication between additional hosts and are continuing this work across the rest of the fleet. Thank you for your continued patience."

Every few days, I receive some sort of newsletter from BNET, the business-focused arm of CNET. The newsletter I received today actually had a few good articles that I wanted to share.

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Being somewhat new to Facebook, I am still enjoying my time on there. I am curious as to which Facebook applications you are all using, and which ones are your favorites.

I really like checking the pictures available in the Bumper Sticker application. Most of them are ridiculous, and some are offensive, but I usually find at least one or two really good ones on the first handful of pages. I also like using the Flixster Facebook app, and really like taking some of the quizzes. For quizzes, though, I like the iLike application even better. Being the music junkie that I am, iLike is a perfect application for me. The music quizzes are usually insanely difficult, but they are a blast to play.

What are your favorite Facebook apps? What do you find yourself doing to kill time while you’re logged on over there?

WordPress 2.6 has been released, and the new feature list seems impressive.

Here is a quick list of the features that have been added to the new version of WordPress:

• Versioning control - you can now track and compare changes when editing an existing post
• Press This! - you can add a bookmark to your browser’s toolbar, which will automatically start a post with the content of whatever page you’re viewing when you press the bookmark. For instance, if you visit YouTube, you can use the Press This! button to automatically post the video you’re viewing on your blog
• Gears - I’m honestly not sure what this does, but it appears to be some sort of plugin for your browser, completely independent of WordPress, that allows you to cache common CSS and JS files while you’re browsing the Web
• Theme previews - you can now test drive a theme while you are developing it, rather than having to make it active to see what it really looks like
• Word count
• Image captions
• …much more

Here’s a short video detailing some of the updates. A higher res version is available in the official WordPress blog:

If you are using WordPress (like we are here at HTMLCenter and I am on one of my personal sites), it seems like it’s really worth it to run out and pick up the new version. If you’re not a WordPress user, now might be a good time to become one.

Let us know what you think of it once you get it configured.

I have been using and customizing a couple of Gallery2 installations at work and in my personal life. I have to say that I am extremely impressed at how advanced and powerful the application really is.

The installer is probably the easiest (besides WordPress) installation I’ve ever performed. All I had to do was download a small starter package, add a password and upload it to the correct directory. From there, the installer transferred all of the necessary files from Gallery’s server over to mine and gave me very explicit instructions on how to configure all of the settings.

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Drupal founder Dries Buytaert is out with his yearly Drupal download stats. Overall, Drupal has been downloaded 1.4 million times with Drupal 5 leading the pack. New version 6.0 is picking up the pace with more and more downloads each month.

These numbers only include downloaded from Drupal’s Web site. Other download options aren’t included in the chart below.

Videojug has put together a simple video about what CSS is and how to use it. It’s just the really simple basics but still worth a view. And if you have questions, stop by our CSS help forum.

A few weeks ago, I read about Woopra over on CN. Intrigued, I decided to give it a try. I registered two accounts (one for work and one for personal use) and signed up all of the sites I manage.

A week or two later, I received notification that my sites had all been approved, and that I could start using Woopra to track them. I got all of the tracking code installed, downloaded the Woopra client to my desktop and started watching the action on my sites.

For a week or so, I was really impressed. The interface is extremely attractive, and has lots of pretty colors. The data it collects seems to be most of what I want from an analytics service.

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With VirtualBox running very effectively on all of my computers, I decided to start looking into some alternative linux distributions. I am, admittedly, a SuSE fanboy. It was the first Linux distro I ever tried, and, excepting my limited usage of hosted servers running on other platforms, and attempting to use Sun Solaris 10, it’s the only *nix distro I’ve ever tried. I was so impressed with it from the start that I never looked back.

However, now that I’ve begun to look into other distros, I’ve found something that’s severely lacking, so far. It seems that SuSE is one of only a very small few that release full packages anymore. Everyone else seems to have one or two choices for installation media - a live disc or a minimal installation CD.

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Intense Debate is one of the new crop of comment replacement services. Basically if you have a blog, you can replace the default commenting system with the one that Intense Debate provides. While I am not a great fan of these replacement services yet, they are gaining in popularity because they offer additional services and functions that the standard blog commenting systems don’t.

I was able to grab some time with Intense Debate developer Austin Hallock and our interview transcript is below.

Allen: Can we start with a brief bio about yourself?
Austin: Sure, I’m 16-years-old, live and goto high school in Arvada, Colorado. I started in the ‘tech world’ when I was 12 building lame Geocities sites, and slowly progressed towards forums (phpBB), and then onto custom built sites that involved a lot more programming. I developed and ran two websites in 2004-2006 that I sold for $10,000 (quite a bit of money to a 15 year old), then moved on towards building another site that never really took off, before moving to Intense Debate.

Allen: How do you describe Intense Debate?
Austin: I think of Intense Debate as simply a better way to do comments. With most blog platforms, comments aren’t really focused on as much as they should be — comments can be what drives traffic to your blog, as well as what gets people to return and engage in a conversation. Intense Debate takes the standard comment system and enhances it to have threading, reputation, and a central storage house for all your comments (as well as a lot more, you can check out the new features we roll out here: http://intensedebate.com/blog/).

Allen: What’s your role with the company?
Austin: I’m one of 2 developers here, and when it comes to programming, I’ve mainly been working on the new features we release every week.

Allen: What’s the technology behind Intense Debate?
Austin: We use PHP5 and mySQL… pretty much the standard LAMP stack. To display our comments on blogs we use a combo of javascript, PHP and a bit of modified AJAX (to work across domains).

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