Friendly URL's with Amazon S3 and Transmit Nov24 '07

I've been using Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) now for almost a year. In that time, I've emptied most of my local hard drives, in an effort to migrate every piece of data onto the web, using S3.

JungleDisk provides a WebDAV connection, which appears as a network drive in the Finder or Windows Explorer. With JungleDisk, copying and pasting files to S3 is as easy as dragging and dropping.

The drawback to using JungleDisk is that your uploaded files are hoarded into an encrypted JungleDisk-specific folder on S3, thereby limiting the visibility of your files once they are uploaded. In the world of web content, using S3 is an effective solution for minimizing overages on bandwidth and scalability. In order to take advantage of this, however, you need a tool that allows you to visualize your "public" content on S3. JungleDisk does not offer such a feature. It is strictly limited to file transfer through standard WebDAV protocol.

In comes Panic's feature-filled Mac OS X FTP client, Transmit. The latest version, 3.6, offers S3 connectivity. Specifically, it allows you to navigate through your S3 files in an FTP-like manner, create new "buckets," and ascertain the permanent, public URL for each file on the web.

("Buckets" are a fancy name for folders.)

Here is the "root" view of my S3 account, as seen through Transmit:

Screenshot of Transmit

I've deliberately masked out the name of the bucket containing files that were transferred using JungleDisk. The other bucket is titled matthomweb. In there, I store public web files, such as podcasts, and anything large that would otherwise quickly eat away at my site's bandwidth.

You can create as many new "buckets" as you'd like, based on these instructions:

Screenshot of Transmit

Most importantly, your public files are accessible via HTTP, beginning with:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/

Complete the URL with the relative path to your files, for example:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/matthomweb/file.txt

Since each bucket is unique amongst all S3 users, you are guaranteed a unique, permanent URL for each file.

Categories: Amazon , FTP , Storage , Transmit

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Two notes: First, as of June, 2008 version 2.x of JungleDisk now supports "Compatible" mode folders (including drive mapping) which are co ... Read more.

matthom is published and produced by Matt Thommes - an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from a suburb of Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.