We are going to wrap up today by setting up an Amazon S3 account. Then next week we are going to adjust the schedule a bit so that we can talk about setting up the S3FlowShield player with Amazon S3, and then we will look at how I do the Vimeo videos and how to embed them. Then we will talk about how to create a video sitemap.
Also next week I am going to be providing a plugin that we can place on the site that will deliver either a mobile version or a non-mobile version of the video depending upon whether they come to your site with a mobile device. The key to making this whole thing work is having the ability to deliver the mobile video when a mobile device arrives. So I am going to provide you with a plugin for that next week and I will show you how to use that plugin. This will be a perk to all of the people who are taking this class.
Amazon Account
We are going to quickly setup an Amazon S3 account. I want you to go to www.amazon.com/s3/. If you already have an Amazon account, great – that is the one you use to buy books and everything else.
Or you can create a new account. Amazon.com/s3, this takes you to the S3 page and we are going to just signup for an account. Rick@tailoringtheweb.com, I am a new user, sign-in using the secure server, again I am a new customer. So then it is going to add login credentials. My name is Rick Anderson. My email address is Rick@tailoringtheweb.com. I am going to enter a new password. Continue. It fills out the whole thing for me except the customer agreement, and Continue.
Now you fill out your credit card information. Once you have that filled out you end up with a page that looks like this. It says “Activating your account… We are in the process of activating your account so that you can begin using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)” and you are going to get an email at this email address telling you that your activation is complete. What you end up with is two emails.
Amazon Web Services Emails
The first is this “Amazon Simple Storage Service Sign-Up Confirmation,” and it has a little thank you thing, confirming that you are there, it gives you some support links and things like that, and reminds you that you need to setup Access Identifiers and gives you a link to set those up. The second email is just a welcome email with some of the same information.
I clicked on that link and when I clicked on that it brought me to here. Because that link was already authenticated, it took me to my site that I had created and it brought me to this page that says “Access Credentials”. These are actually secret access credentials so this isn’t exactly something you are going to want to broadcast, and for those of you that are security conscious I will go ahead and make this inactive after I have shown you how this whole thing works.
Amazon S3, Create Security Credentials
It creates this access key for you, and then gives you this secret access key which if you press Show gives you this little piece as well. So you have this access key and this secret access key pair, which work together for creating login credentials for your Amazon S3 account. Ok, sign out and sign in.
This just got complicated because I started creating a system. So this is your AWS Console. If you want to get back to your security credentials, what do is come back over here and select that account. And then from account, when you click on this button all of these things drop down. Click over on Security Credentials. So here we are with the access key and the secret access key, and those are the keys which were showing on my security credentials thing.
I just want to show you this slide in case you are looking at it without watching the video. If you click on this account this shows up. If you click on Security Credentials you will get back to that page, and it is the security credentials page. It is important to be able to get here because you will have to grab it for things, and it took me a while to remember how to find this Security Credentials page because it is not as self-evident as it seems it is when I show it to you this way.
Create an Amazon S3 Bucket
We go back over to here, we have our security credentials, and what we have now is our account. Now we want to go back to our AWS Management Console and we are going to create an Amazon S3 bucket. A bucket is essentially a filing cabinet or a URL, and it will store folders and files. My opinion about best practices is that your bucket name should be the name of your site, plus a dot, plus some sort of identifier.
In this case, I am going to say that the name is “thesisemember” and then the identifier will be “videos”. In terms of region I am going to select US Standard. If you are in the U.S., select US Standard. Skip Set Up Logging, but go to Create. So now we have created a bucket, “thesisemember”.
Create a Folder for the Amazon S3 Bucket
Next you are going to want to create a folder for this. So I am going to create a folder there and that folder will be called “how-to-install-wordpress”. I want you to understand something about names here. These become URLs, you need to treat them as if they are URLs. So you want to keep lowercase letters; no spaces, no special characters. If you are going to use spaces, put hyphens where the spaces are going to go, that kind of thing. We have created that folder.
Upload a Video to the Amazon S3 Bucket
Now we are going to upload a file to this bucket. So we will go ahead and Upload. We are going to add a file. Then just go to your site, where that is, Websites, BYOBwebsites, videos, membership website. No. It is Start Building Your Website Here. Then we will go down to Video 1aHD and select the MP4 video and select open.
You just want to make sure that this MP4 video has a name that is acceptable for URL, so again no spaces and no special characters, and if it is going to go in a sitemap you want to make sure it has some keywords in it too. I like to use a descriptive name plus a name that will help me understand my own site’s organization. Start the upload. Then let it do its upload thing.
Today, we are just going to stop at creating the Amazon S3 account, creating a bucket, creating a folder, and uploading a video.
