What’s new in CloudBerry Twitter Plug-in for IE?

For a while we have not done much with CloudBerry twitter plug-in for IE.  Twitter looks like an exciting communication platform with lots of opportunities however we have been working hard on our Cloud Storage products and have not been able to make a lot of changes. But we are trying to listen to our customers and learn how they want to use our product.

Initially we designed TweetIE to be the tool that will only post quotes from the website. One of the things we learned since TweetIE was released is that many people wanted to make a short URL optional. Apparently people want just to tweet from the web browser, not necessarily posting a quote or a link. We realized that some people are not even aware that links are added automatically and tweeted all kinds of funny links including Gmail accounts and Google home page. This was our bad and we decided to change that!

So now the links are optional. You have a complete control on whether the link is attached or not. Let’s see how it works.  Imagine you are surfing the net and find something interesting you want to share on twitter. You click the tool bar button.  The window will pop up. If you selected a text on the page it will show up in the text area and the link will appear in the textbox below.

Only if you click Add link button will the link get attached to the text.  When you click the button the link will get shortened with our favorite http://chilp.it URL shortener.  Besides, if you change your mind before you click Tweet button you can simply delete the URL as it is now simply part of the text.

Last but not least if you accidently exceeded twitter message limit of 140 symbols we will change the background to red to alert you shorten the text.

We hope you will find our changes useful and keep using our plug-in in the future. If you got here by chance and have not used Twitter plug-in at all please go ahead and download here

You can also find us on Internet Explorer 8 Add-ons Gallery.

Special note for Firefox users: CloudBerry Lab consists primarily of Microsoft guys but we respect your choice to use Firefox and we have Firefox extension too. You can find it on Mozilla Firefox Add-ons. Firefox extension works in exactly the same way as IE plug-in.

CloudBerry Online Backup – Intro

CloudBerry Online Backup is a Windows product that automates backup and restore processes and works with your Amazon S3 storage accounts.

It has been awhile since we first announced that we are working on the product. Being a small company without external funding it is hard to make several products at the same time and we are proud to announce that CloudBerry Online Backup is currently in beta. We really want this product to be community driven just like CloudBerry Explorer freeware and we are going to run an extended beta and gather as much user feedback as we can before finally releasing the product.

Remember all beta testers will get a FREE commercial license when the product is out!

Backup Wizard

Backup Wizard is designed to help you start using the product and create backup plans. While running the wizard you will specify files and folders to backup, compression and encryption settings, retention period and backup schedule.

On the first pass of the Wizard you will also have to specify your Amazon S3 account access /security keys and a bucket where you want backup files to be stored. If you don’t have a bucket the product will create it for you.

Backup Plans

On the backup plan screens you can get an overview of your backup plans as well as monitor the progress of currently running backup plan, pause and stop it. The storage capacity indicator always shows you how much space is currently consumed by your backup. From this screen you may run restore for a certain plan just click “Restore Files” that will guide you to the Restore Wizard.

Online Backups

Online backups screen is designed to help you browse your backup storage. You can locate files and its versions there. You can also restore individual or multiple files right from this screen

Restore Wizard

Restore Wizard helps you quickly and easily restore individual files or the whole backup sets as specified in backup plan.

Here is the list of CloudBerry Online Backup features

1. Backup wizard helps you to configure a backup plan and start copying your files to cloud storage in a matter of minutes.

2. Restore wizard will guide you through the restore process.

3. Files versioning will create a version of the files every time the file is changed. It will help you to revert to any of the version of the file later. It works closely with Point in time restore feature.

4. Intelligent backup will identify only the files that were modified since the last backup and copy only those files to the storage. This will help to speed up and eliminate excessive storage and transfer fees.

5. Retention policies help you to define for how long to keep a copy of the file in the backup storage and how many versions of the file. It helps to further reduce your storage costs while maintaining the copies of the files.

6. Point in time restore will help you to get a file or the whole folder with file to any point in the past.

7. Backup storage browser is available on Online Backups screen helps you quickly locate a file and restore it. It will be extended with a search function in the future.

8. Encryption capabilities help ensure that only authorized users can access the contents of your backup storage.

What is coming next

We know that virtual drive feature is something that is very popular among Amazon S3 users. It helps to expose Amazon S3 storage as a local disk. We are working hard to add virtual drive to the product.

Conclusion

As you can see CloudBerry Online backup is a product that matches in functionality with more established vendors. We are excited about cloud storage technologies and we believe into the future of our online backup solution.

How to manage Amazon CloudFront logs with CloudBerry Explorer

CloudBerry lab is trying to keep up with the fascinating pace of the innovations that are rapidly introduced by Amazon Web Services team. We are excited about the introduction of CloudFront Access log and glad to announce that we support it in CloudBerry Explorer

What is CloudFront Access logging?

CloudFront access log helps you to understand what kind of request served by your CloudFront distributions over time. Access logs are activity records that show you details about every request delivered through Amazon CloudFront. It is similar to the log file that popular web servers such as Apache or MS IIS generate. With the log file you can get feel of the nature of request for your content.

How to turn on Amazon CloudFront log

Just select the bucket configured for CloudFront and click the logging on the toolbar. Check Use CloudFront Access Logs option; specify the prefix and the bucket where you want the log files to be written.

Note: you can specify somebody a bucket from another Amazon S3 account; just make sure you have proper permissions set. Just make sure that the owner of the CloudFront distribution has a write access to the bucket.

How to view CloudFront logs

Once you turn on your logs they will start coming up in the bucket you configured it for. Logs will typically be written every hour. Files are coming in and they are compressed using GZip to save some space. CloudFront Access Logs will use the W3C extended format (http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-logfile.html). An example of the content of your bucket where the log files are located is shown below: CloudBerry Explorer allows you to view files in the raw format.

Or you can switch to the log viewer format that will help you to view your log files in the grid, sort and filter. It

You can also view a simple chart that shows you the number of requests/ number of bytes per day.

Another useful chart shows the breakdown of the activity by CloudFront edge locations.

Is there more advanced way to analyze CloudFront logs

Yes! There are multiple tools out there that will help you to slice and dice CloudFront logs. Good Data provides Amazon CloudFront Analytics online. If you incline to desktop based product I would suggest SiSense Prism Viewer with Amazon S3 dashboard.

Conclusion

With the addition of CloudFront access log support in CloudBerry lab demonstrates ongoing commitment to make the most comprehensive solution for Amazon S3 and CloudFront services. CloudBerry Explorer is becoming a compelling tool that helps users to accomplish their tasks in the most efficient way.

What’s new in CloudBerry Explorer 1.5

It has not been a long time since we released version 1.4 followed up by version 1.4.1 with several bug fixes. In this new version we are excited to announce some new advanced features that will help you to be even more productive managing your Amazon S3 and CloudFront accounts.

Custom http-headers

The main feature of CloudBerry Explorer 1.5 is custom http-headers support. This feature will be probably mostly used for setting up Cache-Control and Expires http-headers. We will make a separate post explaining how this feature works.

Copy path from the path bar

Another new feature is the ability to copy the path from the path bar

Just click with your mouse to turn it to the text box

 

Manage CloudFront log files

Last but not least we are adding the ability to turn on Amazon CloudFront logs right from the CloudBerry Explorer. We are also going to make a separate post about it.

 

Conclusion

With the ability to set custom http headers CloudBerry Explorer is becoming a compelling tool for Amazon S3 users, in particular to web site developers who want to have granular control on how the files are handled by web browser. Other features demonstrates our continues commitment to support most of the Amazon S3 and CloudFront feature and make our product the tool of the choice on Windows platform.

How to generate reports on Amazon S3 log files with SiSense

In one of our previous posts we discussed how to enable Amazon S3 logging with CloudBerry Explorer. You can also check out how to enable S3 logging here. In this blog we will discuss how to actually view the log files.  Amazon S3 log files come in their proprietary formats, what’s more under certain circumstances one log record can show up in two log files at the same time, which makes the reconciliation process rather difficult. Besides, there are not very many tools around there that could help you to view the log files in the meaningful way.

 Now comes SiSense Prism, which is a powerful Business Intelligence tool. It helps you to generate visual reports on the data coming from different sources. SiSense consist of two products SiSense Prism Desktop a commercial product that helps you to create visual reports on your data and SiSense Prism Viewer a freeware product that can be used to view the reports created with Editor. But what is the most interesting for our readers is that SiSense Prism Viewer it comes with the pre-build dashboards for Amazon S3 logs.

How to obtain SiSense

SiSense Viewer is a free downloadable product that you can get here

You will also need an Amazon S3 pre-defined dashboard that you can download here It is required to register and get your SiSense account to access download section, but the registration process is simple and straight forward. While there we also encourage you to download a trail version of Prism Desktop and try other predefined dashboards.  Prism Desktop will help you to create your own Amazon S3 dashboard if the predefined one doesn’t fit your requirements.

How to view the Amazon S3 Dashboard with Prism Viewer

Open SiSence Prism Viewer. Click open button on the tool bar

Locate the file of the S3 Dashboard and open it.

The dashboard comes with some dummy data and now you want to connect it to your Amazon S3 bucket with the log files.

How to connect Amazon S3 dashboard to your bucket

The second step is to connect to your bucket. Open Amazon S3 Settings using “Settings” link

Note: If you have already created connection to your Bucket using SiSence Prism Desktop, you will see it in this dialog below.

You can select a bucket using Edit Connection button.  Connect to AmazonS3 dialog will be opened.

Specify Access Key /Secret Access Key, select your Bucket from drop-down list and specify your connection Name

NOTE: If you bucket doesn’t have the logging enabled Prism Viewer will offer to enable it

 You have several options on how you want to synchronize the log files.  this helps you to save a lot of time if you want to load only subset of log files from Amazon S3.   Press Synchronize button to proceed.

 By now you will have everything ready to analyze your Amazon S3 logs.

Working with the Dashboard

Select the period you want to analyze your logs

Refresh all document

Dashboard is refreshed

You can also go to other tabs:

1. -          Traffic Sources
   
2. -          Visitors
   
3. -          Content
   

When you open other tab, you should also change the period and refresh the tab

When you close this application, you can save changes and when you open the dashboard again next time, you will see your data

 

Conclusion

Amazon S3 log files contain valuable information about the way your Amazon S3 buckets are used, but they are not easy to analyze as there are no out of the box tools that will help you to do that. SiSense Prism Viewer coupled with predefined Amazon S3 dashboard provides you with an easy way to start understanding your Amazon S3 log files as it show the information on your log file in easy to grasp visual charts. You can download it and start looking into your log files in a matter of minutes and best of all it is completely free! In our follow-up articles we will show you how to generate custom Amazon S3 log reports with SiSense Prism Desktop.  Stay tuned!