Network and Security

A couple of weeks ago, Nettuts+ posted an introductory tutorial to using Amazon's Simple Storage System (S3) . Being able to upload an unlimited number of files for hardly any money is great, but it would be even better if your users could upload files from your website. That way you wouldn't have to worry about the size of your web server for a second. Let's try! Basically what we're going to do is use a standard HTML file element and an easy to use S3 PHP class to make a page where people can upload a file to your S3 account and get information about the files that have already been uploaded. For this you'll need an Amazon S3 account and a PHP enabled webserver. If you haven't heard about Amazon S3, or you don't have an account yet, read Collis' Introductory S3 Tutorial first. Step 1 Now, the first thing we'll need is a way for PHP to communicate with the S3 server. Donovan Schonknecht has written a PHP class for this, so rather than t...

This post is part of a series called Data Visualization App Using GAE Python, D3.js and Google BigQuery . Data Visualization App Using GAE Python, D3.js and Google BigQuery: Part 2 Imagine that you have a large set of data with millions of rows and you're faced with the task of extracting information from the data. How do you make sense of a large set of data? The simple answer to this question is that we do so via data visualization, but what is that, exactly? Data visualization is the pictorial representation of data to figure out what is hidden inside the information. In this three-part series, we'll create a visualization app to extract information and make sense of a large set of data. Querying large chunks of data without proper hardware can result in performance issues. Google provides a solution to this problem in the form of BigQuery . Backed by Google's infrastructure, it enables you to query large chunks of data. We'll be using a dataset from G...

There are lots of different ways to communicate with your users these days. RSS feeds, SMS, & sites like Twitter have changed how we speak to our audience. But for my money, you can't beat the personal touch of a good ol' email newsletter. Of course keeping up a newsletter can take effort, but in this tutorial I'll show you how to use your regular Wordpress website combined with Feedburner to make a simple email newsletter manager. There are many dedicated and great email newsletter solutions on the market. This is not intended to replace them, but rather to offer an easy way to email visitors of your personal site or blog a round up of updates and news without having to install new software or set up new systems. What we are going to do is: Create a 'Newsletter' category in Wordpress Hide it from regular posts Create an RSS feed for that category Give that feed to FeedBurner and use their email update service to deliver our newsletter. This tuto...

This post is part of a series called Data Visualization App Using GAE Python, D3.js and Google BigQuery . Data Visualization App Using GAE Python, D3.js and Google BigQuery In the first part of this series, we created a Python application and deployed it to Google App Engine (GAE). From the application we connected it to a  Google BigQuery dataset and fetched the data into our application. In this tutorial, we'll see how to visualize the data using the JavaScript library D3.js . 1. Getting Started With D3.js D3.js is a JavaScript library to create data-driven documents. It uses the capabilities of HTML5, SVG and CSS3 to create interactive visualizations based on arbitrary data. It also makes use of different transformations to make the display visually more appealing. From the D3.js official site : D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web stand...