Amazon offers some pretty cool services: S3, EC2, Alexa Site Thumbnail, and others. A while back I wanted to use AST with Django, so ended up writing the Python bindings to the REST API (they didn’t previously exist. I even wrote up a quick tutorial. Update: Amazon no longer maintains AST. I’ve decided to archive a few of the old sites, so no longer need to take thumbnails. However, a few other thumbnail services seem to have crept up, including SnapCasa", and WebSnapr.

The date is June 25, 2007, and I’ve sinned. Let me explain. I’ve been involved in technology for quite some time and have long been opposed to Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster. I never felt any urge to join; I always thought people spent too much time updating their profiles instead of writing something useful or insightful, or doing something productive. Two months ago, I broke my rule and joined MySpace for a single day because I needed to contact someone.

Back in the day the barrier to entry for the Internet was quite high. The technology used required a steep learning curve, the equipment extremely expensive, and sometimes even hard to acquire. Fast forward to 2007 and things have certainly changed. If you know any tech people you can likely get free hosting for a small website, and even more demanding websites can be hosted for not much. The cost of dedicated servers has dropped even more. And the final kicker: web services. I’ve started to think of some web services not as a service, but more like outsourcing requirements.

For one of my projects I need to generate thumbnails for a page. And lots and lots and lots of them. Even though I can generate them via a python script and a very light “gtk browser”, I would prefer to mitigate the server load. To do this I’ve decided to tap into the Alexa Thumbnail Service. They allow two methods: REST and SOAP. After several hours of testing things out, I’ve decided to toss in the towel and settle on REST. If you can spot the error with my SOAP setup, I owe you a beer. I’m using the ZSI module for python.

As some of you may know, I have some projects cooked up. I don’t expect to make a million bucks (wish me luck!), but a few extra bills in the pocket wouldn’t hurt. Plus, I’m seriously considering further education, which will set me back a few-thirty grand. That said, one of my projects will rely heavily on Amazon Web Services. Amazon has, for quite some time now, opened up their information via REST and SOAP. I’ve been trying (virtually the entire day) to get SOAP to work, but seem to get snagged on a few issues. Stay tuned.