XtraSimplicity

I was recently trying to set up a server on Amazon’s AWS, but became overwhelmed with seemingly confusing information, and long-winded documentation, so I tried to find a way to set up a server as simply as I possibly could. After a bit of Googling, I have my server set up, and am well on my way to having a running Sencha Touch server.

The tutorial I followed can be found below, and here. I’ve posted it here so that I can find it in the future.

1.) Sign up for an Amazon EC2 Account

• Visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
• Click on “Sign Up Now” to begin the EC2 registration.
• Enter your amazon account info (or register for a new Amazon.com account)
• Agree to AWS terms and enter payment info.
• Identity Verification by telephone.
• Wait for account activation…(few minutes to an hour)

2) Create A Security Group for web access

• Login to your account at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/
• The first step will be to create a Security Group that allows HTTP connections and limited (optional) SSH to configure the instance.
• Click on Security Groups > Create Security Group

•  and complete the following form.

• Click on ‘Yes, Create’ to continue.
• Now, select your newly created security group ‘web_access’ and click the ‘inbound’ tab that appears below.

• In the ‘Inbound’ tab, select ‘HTTP’ from the create new rule drop-down menu. Leave the source as ‘0.0.0.0/0’ and select ‘+Add Rule’.

• Next, from the ‘inbound’ tab, select ‘SSH’ from the create new rule drop-down menu. Again, leave the source as ‘0.0.0.0/0’ and select ‘+Add Rule’.
• NOTE: Alternatively, you may put your current machine’s IP address into the ‘source’ to restrict access only to you. Later in the tutorial I’ll be showing you how to add authenticated user who may SSH with username and password, which requires the ‘0.0.0.0/0’ in the SSH source.
• Finally, click ‘Apply Rule Changes’ to commit your rules.

3) Install A LAMP-friendly instance

• Return to the EC2 Dashboard by selecting ‘EC2 Dashboard in the navigation tree on the left’.
• Select ‘Launch Instance’ in the center to begin the process of installing your first sever.

• It will offer you two options, Classic Wizard or Quick Launch Wizard. Select Classic Wizard and click ‘Continue’ to proceed.

• Next, select ‘Community AMIs’ from the tabs and search for the following:
  • ami-ccf405a5
  • UPDATE: The previous AMI used in this tutorial has been discontinued! Try this one instead:
  • ami-5ec7775f

Personally, I used ami-0832775a. -XtraSimplicity

• Click the ‘Select’ button to begin configuring your Ubuntu Linux machine image.
• On the next screen you’ll see your ‘Instance Details’. The Instance Type should default to ‘Micro (t1.micro, 613mb) which is the Free tier server. Leave the ‘Availability Zone: No Preference” set and click continue.

• The next screen offers a few additional ‘Advanced Instance Options’. You can skip this page and hit ‘continue’ to proceed.
• The next screen will give you an option to ‘Tag’ your instance for better organization within the EC2 dashboard. You can skip this step unless you plan on having many instances running simultaneously. Click ‘continue’ to proceed.

• Now you will need to create a new Key Pair file to allow you to safely and securely connect to your new server from your current machine.
• Enter the name ‘mykeypair’ and click ‘Create & Download your Key Pair’. Save this to a directory you can easily access. I’ll be putting it in my home directory.

• The next screen allows you to choose your security group. Select the group we created (‘web_access’) and then click ‘Continue’.

• The next screen is the ‘Review’ screen and provides a summary of our server options. Verify that your options match the screenshot below and click ‘Launch’ to launch your first instance!

4) Select and Assign an Elastic IP

• In a few moments, your new machine image will begin to boot up and be shown as ‘running’ in the ‘Instances’ page.

• In order to connect to the server, and to allow others to as well, we need to assign an elastic IP address. Select ‘Elastic IPs’ from the navigation menu on the left.
• Select ‘Allocate New Address’ and when a pop-up appears, make sure ‘EC2’ is selected and click ‘Yes, Allocate’.

• Your new IP address will appear in the main view, but it is not yet associated with your server. To associate your new IP with your server, select ‘Associate Address’ button above the main view. Then, you will select your instance from drop-down menu and select ‘Yes, Associate’.

• The Address will now show the instance ID and associated Public DNS of your server.

• In the next section, we’ll be connecting to our server from the terminal console (Mac OS X). For a brief overview of using terminal, see this article.

5) Configuring your server via SSH

What You’ll Need: an SSH Client. SSH is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers. We’ll be using it to connect to our newly installed EC2 server.

Windows: PuTTy.exe (download here)

• Download PuTTy.exe and PuTTyGen.exe
• Open PuTTyGen.exe and follow the directions shown here: (link)
• When prompted for “login as:” type “ubuntu” and press [enter]

Mac OS X: Terminal.app (launch from spotlight)

• Open terminal and navigate to the folder on your local (current) machine where you downloaded your Key Pair file. If you saved the Key Pair file to your home directory (on OS X), you can go ahead and type the following commands to restrict the permissions of the Key Pair file:

chmod 600 mykeypair.pem

• You may now connect via SSH by issuing the following command.
• NOTE: Replace the ‘23.23.223.33’ shown in the command below with the Elastic IP you associated with your server in the previous step.

I’ve noticed a simple contact us form is something that a lot of people frequently look for online, however many of the current solutions/examples out there are quite complex, ‘bloated’, and can also be, in some cases, complete overkill.

So here’s a simple PHP-based contact us form which makes use of one single PHP file to handle both the output of the form, the output of the thank you message, and the email processing.

You are more than welcome to copy and use this code both in a commercial and non-commercial sense.

1. <?php
2. if($_POST['contact']) { // if user submitted the form, then
3. extract($_POST); // extract form contents and assign them to variables
4. $name = htmlentities($name);
5. $subject = htmlentities($subject);
6. $msg = htmlentities($msg);
7. $msg .= “Name: {$name}”;
8. mail(‘recipient-email@domain.com’,$subject,$msg);
9. }
10. ?>
11. <html>
12. <head>
13. </head>
14. <body>
15. <form name=”contactus” action=”<?php $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>” method=”POST”>
16. Name: <input type=”text” name=”name” /><br />
17. Subject: <inpout type=”text” name=”subject” /><br />
18. Message: <input type=”textarea” name=”msg” /><br />
19. <input type=”submit” name=”contact” value=”Contact us” /></form>
20. </body>
21. </html>

It is crucial to consider that the automatically created variables, which were extracted from the $_POST array, are the same as the name of each input element.
For example:
<input type="text" name="xyz" id="xyz_input" />

Would result in a variable $xyz being created, which would be assigned the value of xyz_input.value

The htmlentities() functions are used to convert any HTML tags within the input boxes to the HTML character code equivalents, to help prevent unsanitized data from being processed. Note: Typically, using htmlentities alone is not enough – it’s strongly suggested that you use Javascript or PHP to validate the input fields prior to processing. In Web Development, always consider that someone out there may enter incorrect and/or potentially malicious data into your forms (google SQL injection, etc and you’ll see what I mean).

Obviously, if your web host doesn’t support the mail() function, you might have to consider sending your mail via an SMTP provider, using an SMTP class. There are plenty of these on the internet, however this SMTP class seems quite promising. (I haven’t used this, however – so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.)

SnipeMe is an easy to use eBay bid sniper, aimed to automate the eBay bidding process.
You simply enter the eBay Item number (found on the eBay item page, to the right, underneath the Seller information box), i.e. 170550521897; The price which you want to bid; the Date in which you want to bid; and the time that you want to bid.

It is best to set the Bid time no closer than 30 seconds to the auction’s end time. The Bid time is entered in 24-hour time format.

Download:Download SnipeMe v1.0