Amazon Web Services Blog

• Take study-worthy lecture notes
  “This semester I’m going to perfect a strategy that gets my notes right the first time: the Cornell Note-taking method.”
• Get a free college education online
  “Not headed back to school this fall? You could be, minus the exorbitant tuition and without even leaving your chair.”
• Play games on your iPod for FREE
  “Play video games like Texas Hold ‘Em, Tetris, and Bejeweled (all of which are for sale at the iTunes Store) on pretty much any iPod with a little bit of virtual elbow grease for free.”
• Geek to Live: The 100th installment
  “This is the 100th installment of Geek to Live, which has spanned every one of my personal nerdy obsessions over the past year: from home networking, Firefox, and data security to personal finance, netiquette and web publishing.”
• How to choose achievable goals
  “The most important attribute of a list of goals is that it constantly shift, move around, evolve, and feel alive.”
• Early Adopter Download of the Day: Firefox 2.0 RC 1 (All platforms)
  “Since the Beta 1 release back in July, the good folks at Mozilla have been hard at work polishing and preening our favorite web browser.”
• Download of the Day: Lifehacker search plugin (Firefox)
  “Why get Google involved? To be frank, our current site search sucks sideways, that’s why.”
• One phone number to rule them all
  “GrandCentral’s features are a little mind-blowing, in that ‘I’d never thought of that, but how am I now living without it?’ sort of way.”
• Download of the Day: Pathway (Mac)
  “As you browse Wikipedia with Pathway, it creates a graphical network of nodes based on your visited articles.”
• IE7 still handles feeds better than Firefox 2.0
  “While Firefox 2 RC1 handles RSS feeds very nicely (and has since the beta), IE7 still has advanced feed handling features that Firefox lacks.”

Lifehacker posts flooding your feed reader? Subscribe to the Highlights feed for a once-weekly hit of the good stuff. Need a little more? The Top stories feed has a mere handful of posts per day. Have a great weekend!

Every day, a member of the Amazon Web Services PR Team collects and distributes links to blog postings and other interesting articles about our services. I'm sure that most companies do something similar for their products; tracking this "buzz" is a great way to see what people really think about your products -- it is a great way to see raw, unvarnished feedback.

I am happy to report that we are now posting the once-internal AWS Daily Buzz to del.icio.us/awsbuzz each day. You can now visit that page (or subscribe to its RSS feed) and you'll see the same set of links that we see inside of the company.

Although this was done to provide you with more useful information regarding our services, it is certainly another way in which we are "opening up", providing outsiders with more access to the same tools and content that we use internally.

-- Jeff;

Minutes ago we rolled out a major upgrade to the Amazon Web Services Resource Center. Here's what's new:

Product Centers - Each web service category is now a self-contained portal for that web service, complete with boxes and RSS feeds for the newest and most popular resources in the category. There are also "go-to" buttons that link directly to the latest docs, latest release notes, and the online version of the Getting Started Guide for the service.

Review Improvements - There is now a "Write a Review" button next to each topic to encourage developers to review our resources. We want you to highlight the resources that work best for you.

Formatting Improvements - For a smoother and cleaner overall experience.

Co-Marketing - There's a new Co-marketing tab in the Developer Connection. Inside this tab you can find information on how to get your product into our Solutions Catalog, how to submit your success story, how to get a quote from Amazon for use on your web site or other marketing materials, how to issue a press release, how to get your material into our newsletter, and how to write an article or code sample.

Within this tab you can also find information on getting our cool new "Powered by Amazon Web Services" logo for your application:

Of course you could just take that logo and slap it on your application, but that's not the right thing to do since you won't get the other benefits that are intrinsic to the logo program. Visit that Co-marketing tab, follow the directions, and you'll be able to sleep better at night. The logo is available in several different sizes and formats.

-- Jeff;

These sample .jsp pages use the ThumbnailUtility.jar package to return HTML snippets that display site thumbnails on a web page.

These sample .php pages use the ThumbnailUtility.php package to return HTML snippets that display site thumbnails on a web page.

A sample in C# that demonstrates how to use Amazon SQS, SOAP, and x509 authentication.

A sample in Java that demonstrates how to use Amazon SQS, SOAP, and authentication.

The Amazon EC2 AMI Tools are command-line utilities to help bundle an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), create an AMI from an existing machine or installed volume, and upload a bundled AMI to Amazon S3.

Here at Lifehacker, we're at your service. Got a question, application, problem or story you'd like us to cover? Hit us up with post requests for next week in the comments and we'll get to work!

A few takeaways from last week's lively request line thread:

• Yes, Lifehacker's site search sucks. We know better than anyone. Would you believe me if I told you we're working on it?
• Many of you asked for a forum, but post comments are our forum. We've been rolling out improvements to the commenting system over the past few months and will continue to do so. We know you're an engaged and growing community, and we're going to do all we can to encourage and facilitate that.
• Yes, we're post a lot every day, usually just under 20 times. If you're feeling buried, here's how to hack LH feed URLs to get only the posts you want to see.
• You want original content? You got it - one original longform article almost every week day. Want just the Windows-specific posts? Just the Mac-specific posts? You got that too.
• Just in case you want to know the deal with our downloads, here's our official Download Policy. Also, here's how to add a snazzy avatar to your user profile. (Yeah, those images are taking their sweet time showing up in comment threads, but they'll get there. Eventually. Promise.)
• Finally, we've got a handy new tag going for site-specific information: the Reader Guide to Lifehacker. Check it out for site-related feature announcements and other goodness all boiled down to one page.

Don't forget: make your story requests for next week in the comment thread below. — Gina Trapani