A couple of posts back, I walked through uploading an image to AWS S3 without the need for a server of your own. This has the advantage of being a fully standalone, browser client only solution. Of course images by themselves aren’t very useful. Likely we want to collect some additional information.

Previously, I covered uploading to S3 from a Rails app using a presigned-url. This works just fine, but means the data flows from the visitors computer to your server before heading to S3. I’ve previously showed how to upload the file directly to S3, which requires a world-writable bucket.

There’s also a hybrid solution that has the server generate a presigned-url which the browser then uses to go direct to S3, allowing the data to bypass the server. Let’s look at two ways to do this.

Last time, I walked through directly uploading an image to an S3 bucket from the browser with no server involved. That last bit is important. If you are using a server, then PreSigned URLs are a better choice as they do not require a world-writable bucket.

Want to upload an image directly to S3 from the browser? Here’s what you need.

Previously, I worked through how to get messages from an IMAP server and work with the message headers. Let’s look at extracting data from those messages.

There’s a really solid, tried and true, Internet wide messaging queue. It’s been around for decades and has first class support in Ruby. What is it? Email. That’s right, email.

Here’s something slightly random and the exact opposite of technical, the Bullet Journal.

I’ve tried just every to-do/productivity app/site out there. OmniFocus, Things, Trello, Evernote, Org Mode to name five. But, I never stick to them. They start of well enough, yet end up cluttered with things I’m never going to do. Or things I sort of did. Or things that are too nebulous to be meaningful.

If you are reading my blog, odd are you already know how to use ssh-add to manage you SSH keys. If not, you can read up on it.

Up to speed? ssh-add has a few other features that people, including me, forget about. Let’s take a look.

Recently, I had the task of speeding up the response time of an app that depended on a remote API. The issue was that the API could take a long time to respond in some cases, plus four seconds. Four seconds is way to long to wait for a web page…

For some reason, I can never remember the right command line option for setting the Host HTTP header with curl. It’s actually something I need to do fairly regularly, it comes up testing server configurations before making changes to DNS.