Ok, so I moved to Amazon EC2 from the old host, www.apthost.com. Apthost was great (and I still have them of course for a while), but oddly enough my sessions started having issues and I couldn't log in to the admin back end of my application...I thought I broke my code...naturally I check it locally then on another server of mine. It worked. So I'm going to assume (without spending a ton of time) that Apthost did something to their php.ini or other settings that created and issue.

There's a lot of problems like this with shared hosting and that's ultimately the reason why I'll never go back...after I start moving off all my things from Apthost, Lunarpages, and some other host that I really shouldn't have. Now, EC2 has it's drawbacks of course as well. I hope to outline some of these and other topics related to EC2 in this blog along with posting updates about what I'm doing with Minervablog, which is of course a media blog. Maybe I'll even have some screencasts. Important to note though is that Minervablog isn't dead in the water (for the very few that have seen it so far) and it is probably going to take on some new changes due to EC2...I can now program it to infinitely scale and test that ability out without incurring a ton of charges. Then who knows, you might see an AMI out there of Minervablog =)

There will be some cleaning up going on to this blog application. I will also be changing up the way it looks, probably in line and on track with the templating system...which of course just uses CakePHP's "themes" approach.

Though the blog's functionality is pretty far along, so I'm going to be working on some refinements to what I have now. More importantly, I'm going to be working with setting up load balancing solutions and take care of other scalability tasks. This way I can move forward with a more prepared system.

The overall goal here, in case anyone was wondering, is to build a blog (media blog) application that is infinitely scalable and hopefully *impossible* to crash. Of course with the ability to extend the base code and have more than just a media blog in the form you see here.

Ok so the game plan here. This is a version of my application, Minevablog. It needs some cleaning up though. Once I get that all set, I'm going to start stress testing. Well backup...First, well, a backup. Just to be safe. After that, I'll be setting up multiple instances and setting them up to be all load balanced and clustered.

Ok once that multi-instance environment is setup, THEN I'll stress test. Probably running load testing from another instance actually. I will hammer the ever living christ out of this blog and push it. I hope I can get an instance to crash. I want to see how I can keep the site alive under extreme conditions...How I might be able to turn on more instances for support, etc. I also want to benchmark things to see how speedy everything is.  

Mmmm, exciting. 

I'm getting very very tired of this layout. It's accesible, not bad, clean, and even a little different, but it's not familiar enough I fear. Not to be like everyone else out there...Or have my blog look like every other blog out there, but I need it to pop more. Maybe some enhancements/accents or interesting elements can be put into this current design to make it work...Who knows. I'll be changing it soon, I just have to migrate the rest of the tools needed to convert video and clean up some of the code. I also need to find a better solution for media players. It's just tough with such limited time.

So I changed up how videos are converted to FLV. I made it an action an admin needs to perform after uploading videos. I will also re-implement a cron job that can be controlled from the admin back end.

This pretty much puts the installation here on par with, if not slightly ahead of, the Minerva Blog installation. The next thing is of course to get it all setup with EC2 and load balanced/clustered. Aside from making a nice default theme to use. Can it be? A real working demo ready to show off? I sure hope. 

Well, it's back to the original task at hand now that I'm catching all up -- Working with Amazon EC2.