I’ve just moved all the images from macintoshhowto.com over to Amazon Cloudfront. The bottom line is that you should notice macintoshhowto.com speed up. If you want to know how to do it, read on.

How to make your wordpress site real fast using Amazon Cloudfront.

Cloudfront is a way to speed up your web content delivery. Amazon has fast servers all round the world and they are letting people (for a price!) use their infastructure to serve up copies of their own files such as pictures, backgrounds etc. These static files are stored on the Amazon Cloudfront servers. When someone visits your website the main part of your page (the bits that need to actually run php code and so on) come from your own server, but all the images and so on come from the Amazon Cloudfront. This speeds up you site in two ways. 1. Amazon delivers your pictures real fast. 2. This reduces the demand on your own server, making it faster as well.

There are two ways for Cloudfront to work.
1. You upload all your wordpress static files (you wp-content and wp-includes folders) onto Amazon S3, then tell Cloudfront to get your files from Amazon S3 as it needs them.
OR
2. You tell Cloudfront to get the files directly from your site as it needs them. This second way is called ‘Origin Pull’.

The advantage of 1 is that if you ever change your wordpress host, your entire wp-content folder is stored off-site at Amazon S3, so you don’t need to even copy your wp-content folder to your new wordpress installation. The new S3 wp-content folder becomes your wp-content folder – you can even load images directly to S3 and then insert them into your wordpress posts.
The advantage of 2 is that it’s easier and cheaper, and you don’t need to upload the files to Amazon each time you make a new post.

Here is how to setup your wordpress site to use CloudFront via Origin Pull (the second of the above two options). You need to set up an Amazon Cloudfront account, and install one of two cache plugins, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. The Cache plugins will redirect your browser to get the static content from Amazon instead of your site. It’s really quite simple, you just need to put the Cloudfront details into your Cache plugin, and then put your wordpress URL into your Cloudfront account.

STEP 1: SET UP A CLOUDFRONT ACCOUNT

1. Go to Amazon Web Services – http://aws.amazon.com and sign up for Amazon Cloudfront content delivery. If you already have an amazon.com account it can be linked to that account for payment.

2. Go to the Cloudfront Management Console – https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/home

3. Click on ‘Create Distribution’. The following window will appear.

Select Custom Origin not Amazon S3. This means it will automatically pull the content it needs from your website. Enter your website URL under Origin DNS Name: This is where it will pull the content from.

4. Press Continue and on the next page leave everything blank except fill in the comment with something meaningful then press continue.

5. Press Create Distribution.

Check the details and press 'Create Distribution'.

6. The new distribution will appear in the console. Copy the domain name.

6. Copy the domain name. In my case the URL is d3hnrcqh47hd0x.cloudfront.net

STEP 2: PUT THE CLOUDFRONT DETAILS INTO WORDPRESS

Now you will need to go into your wordpress admin and set up the cloudfront server as the place wordpress will go for all your static content files. You do this from the Super Cache or W3 Total Cache plugin.

In WP Super Cache, go to the CDN tab and enter the URL from the cloudfront into the ‘Off-site URL field, and select the ‘Enable CDN Support’ tab. Press ‘Save Changes’

Entering the Cloudfront URL into WP Super Cache

In W3 Total Cache go to the ‘Content Delivery Network’ page, then enter the details under “Replace Site’s hostname with:”

Entering the Cloudfront URL into W3 Total Cache

Unfortunately in W3 Total Cache you will need to fill in the Access key ID and other fields even though these are not needed if you are using Origin Pull. They are only needed if you want to use Amazon S3 as a bucket to load the cloudfront files. We are using Origin Pull so these settings are not needed. Just put in anything like this:

The login details can be anything if you are using Origin Pull because it's Amazon Cloudfront that does the work, not W3 Total Cache.

Also you can ignore any messages like this one below. They don’t apply for Origin Pull. They are telling you that you need to update the files in the S3 bucket, but you’re not using the S3 bucket.

Give it a try!

To test that it’s working, go to your webpage, then from Safari click ‘view source’. You should see the URL of the images in the HTML file are now coming from the cloud server:

img src="http://d3hnrcqh47hd0x.cloudfront.net/wp-content/themes/dpc/images/logo.png" alt="dpc.com"

That’s it. The images and other static files are now coming from the Amazon Cloudserver. It’s all automatic. If you want you can tweak the cache settings to change what files come from the Cloudserver and what come from your site.

I purchased mine from RIHAC in Melbourne, Australia. They have a good unit, with good instructions as well as good phone support, the sell the CIS system for about $150 and it comes with I think it was 100ml of ink per color. Installing the CIS system is about the same complexity as changing a pushbike tyre, or sewing a button on a shirt. If you can follow instructions, you should be able to install it OK. Mine’s been going about 2 years now with no problems at all.

When you have worked your way up the sites, and over the top, the lid will pretty much fall off like this.

These are the screws you need to tighten, there are 4, and the ones on the left are covered by a little piece of yellow sticky tape you need to remove and then replace after you are finished.

The tightening!

That’s it, now carefully put the sticky tape and lid back together, and replace the two screws. It should take about 1/2 hr to an hour.

O dear, this is a tragic topic. Nevertheless, I just installed Windows XP on my Intel Macintosh and it was easy! Windows XP set me back $115, but innotek VirtualBox, the program that let me run windows, was free. It’s pretty fast – it takes about 20 seconds to start Windows (that’s faster than my OSX boots!) and about 6 seconds to turn it off.
Why would you ever want to run windows on a Macintosh? Well I can think of two reasons.

1. The Australia Tax office does not put out a version of their tax return software for Macintosh.

2. If you are a web developer, developing on a Macintosh, your sire will probably look great on every browser except for Windows Explorer. That’s because Windows Explorer has lots of bugs in it and doesn’t display things properly. For this reason, it is a must that you test your websites in Explorer. Seeing as Microsoft have stopped supporting Macintosh, the only way to run Explorer on a Mac is to install Windows. What a shame!

So with that by way of excuse, here’s how to do it…

There are a few options to run Windows on an Intel Macintosh. Boot Camp, Virtual Box, Parallels and VMware Fusion. The first two are free. If you just want to run Windows totally separately to OSX, turning off the computer between OSX and Windows, then go with Boot Camp, it works well and it’s free!

Parallels (click here to download) is better if you want Windows applications more integrated with mac – you can drag and drop between windows and OSX! There is also a program called VMWare Fusion (click here to download) which is like parallels but there doesn’t seem to be as much hype about it – I’m not sure why. It’s meant to be faster than Parallels. You can download both for a 30 day free trial and work out which one you like.

With Bootcamp, Microsoft Windows takes over the whole computer. With Parallels Windows runs inside a window. So Parallels is better for integration, (eg you want to run one or two windows programs easily) but Boot Camp better for performance (eg you want to play games).

I decided that I’m certainly not a serious Windows user, so I downloaded VirtualBox. (click here for download page and select binaries – OSX) It downloads and installs like a normal mac program. When you run it, it comes up with a menu, I selected new, and it asked what kind of machine I wanted to make:

I chose Windows XP. It tells you to put the install disk in your CDROM drive, it asks a few questions, like how much RAM and so-on. I just picked the default answer every time. Then before you know it Windows is up and running. It automatically worked out all the settings. I didn’t have to put in any network settings, or load any drivers or anything. It just worked! I clicked on Windows Explorer and it’s surfing the web.

And here it is, Windows running inside Mac OSX….

Here are some of the settings. As I said, I know nothing about windows so I just used all the ones it suggested.

Oh, and don’t go with Vista, reports are it’s a mess. You can buy Windows XP second hand off ebay. I got a Windows Professional Service Pack 2, whatever that means, for $115.

The symptoms of the fault are as follows:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Here are the results of a survey I conducted here on macintoshhowto.com over a period of 6 months regarding the affected models. It appears all models are affected.

In this article I described the fix for this G4 logic board fault. This survey was to test what models were impacted.

1. Have a look in ~/Library/Spotlight and make sure there are no plugins that might be causing problems. For example, I had an old Mailtags Plugin that was 2 years old, so I deleted it.

2. Make sure you haven’t excluded your mail folder in the spotlight privacy tab (spotlight preferences)

3. Reset the entire spotlight database by opening a terminal window and typing 

sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/*

(It will ask for your password)

4. Open Mail and click on Mailboxes:Rebuild.

That resets spotlight and mailboxes, which I think just about covers all options.