iwBase is a responsive starter theme for Habari. It comes with two stylesheets supporting responsive fixed and responsive fluid layouts. The stylesheets include empty directives for all core areas, and leave most styling up to you. iwBase borrows heavily from Skeleton, as well as the core Habari themes Charcoal and K2 (K2 was a core theme until version 0.8 of Habari).

Download iwBase 0.8.1 from GitHub

iwBase is intended as a few-frills starter theme. The image shows the header with Title, tagline, and navigation (navigation is hard-coded in the header, I did not want to include a custom menu block). Beneath the header is the left content section which includes a top banner area, and the main content display. The sidebar area is configured on the right. A bottom banner area covers the full width at the bottom of the page, directly above the footer, which displays a basic ‘powered by habari’ message and the atom links.

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This is a tale of consumer experience and a formal venting of my frustrations with our Summer monitoring solutions.

About 18 months ago, we had a baby. Joy, frustrations, cute, poop, sleeplessness, etc. When we decided to move the baby to a location more than a few inches away from one of us, it became clear that a video monitor was a must have. The technology is there, it is not terribly expensive, and it surprasses the audio-only experience to a great degree. After cautiously reviewing Amazon ratings and the myriad baby item review sites, we came to the conclusion that Summer offers the best product for the price. They have nice features (remote camera direction/zoom capabilities, pairing multiple video cameras to a single monitor, digital transmission, and color displays), and they were constantly on sale somewhere.

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_[UPDATE] Since I reference this occasionally, and it gets a fair amount activity, I thought I would make a more rudimentary version for anyone wanting easy access to a quick lamp setup on Amazon Linux. You can find the updated version at AWS: Quick and secure LAMP on Amazon Linux. It’s a little more in depth of a setup, and there is very little explanation.

If you are new to Linux/AWS I recommend you read this first, and head over to the Quick and secure setup after._

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This is pretty cut and dry. If you want the more verbose version, head over to AWS: Building a LAMP instance on Amazon Linux.

Start an Amazon Linux instance (I default to 64 bit), and be sure the security group allows access over ports 22 and 80.

Now you can connect with ssh, using your key and the username you configured. Use MySQL Workbench’s Standard TCP/IP over SSH connection type to tunnel to MySQL over SSH.

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I just trashed a drafted post mortem discussing a year of experience with Amazon Web Services under the free usage tier. I trashed it because Amazon just launched updates to their Reserved Instance options.

This is a brilliant move. I know this offering will allow a lot of higher usage organizations to save substantial amounts of money. This means that AWS’s pricing edge on other cloud providers just became a lot more attractive to anyone interested in moving to the cloud, or selecting a cloud service provider. But accompanying some of the lost revenues from savings are all of the low usage individuals and small organizations who have been muddling around in micro instances under the free usage tier for its first year.

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