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New core Frontier feature: S3 Prefs

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I hit the same wall I always hit when looking for a place to store the users' content.  

It's not much of a problem when you're running the server for them, but when the server is running on their desktop, as it is in River2, where do you put the publicly accessible content? I could operate a storage system for them, but what happens if the service doesn't take off and never becomes a business? At some point I have to punt, and that leaves users with data that goes missing. Thinking long-term I don't want to set another one of these up. 

The right answer is to help them get their own storage working. And Amazon has made that relatively easy, so I spent the time to make it really work. 

The users' feeds are stored in Amazon S3. For this I need three pieces of data. The "Access Key ID" (which is the equiv of a username), "Secret Access Key" (password) and a default bucket. That's explained on the Frontier News site. 

Frontier News: New preferences for Amazon S3. 

I created my own feed using the new tool, you can see it's on Amazon. I wouldn't subscribe to it, while it should keep updating, I'm going to merge it with my lifeliner feed.