Amazon have just announced their support for automatic versioning control for all files managed by Amazon’s S3 file storage service. For me, this was one of the missing jigsaw pieces of S3 – a hole filled by a number of suppliers who now are going to have to fight very hard to keep that part of the business model going.

Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects any time you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request….

…Versioning offers an additional level of protection by providing a means of recovery when customers accidentally overwrite or delete objects. This allows you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving.

To get developers up and running with the new versioning server, the Amazon AWS team are running a ‘Introduction to Versioning Support for Amazon S3‘ webinar, which is free to attend.

Google have finally announced that they will be discontinuing support for IE6. Below is the announcement sent to all of their Google Apps customers today:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Although i’m not a big fan of IE6 by any stretch of the imagination, I don’t think that this is a particularly good move for Google. Google are trying to pitch their Apps products to corporate customers – head to head with Microsoft. However, a large number of very big corporations still use IE6 as the browser of choice. And they certainly won’t stop using IE6, just because Google forces them to.

I thought getting Amazon’s S3 storage service up and running would take ages and be quite a mountain to climb. So i was pleased to find this excellent article on getting your first Amazon S3 ‘bucket’ up and running. You’ll need the FireFox S3 add-on (free download) to complete the instructions. Should take you about 10 minutes to complete the tutorial! Would love to hear how you get on.

Update: If you would like to use your own domain for accessing your files stored on S3 (e.g. cdn.mydomain.com instead of my-assets.s3.amazonaws.com), then you’ll find this article useful: How to Alias a Domain Name or Sub Domain to Amazon S3

I’ve just published a new post over on the PageDo Landing Page Optimization Blog discussing the definition of what makes a good landing page. There’s a ton of confusion around what is, and what is not a landing page. So simply put, a landing page is:

A web page that is focussed on achieving a single goal, normally containing a single call-to-action to encourage the person reading the page to respond in a very specific way.

There’s plenty more detail in the original post, including the benefits of building a carefully optimized landing page. You can read the full post here.

One of my weak areas has always been writing domain and page redirects using .htaccess rules. So i was happy to discover this morning (via stevenhargrove.com) a new online tool to help write these tricky, but essential, little files, http://www.htaccesseditor.com.

Developed by Hideyo Ryoken & Masato Mannen, it provides a simple interface for creating the most common types of rewrite rules you may need to create, including deny all access to files, basic authentication, error page, default page, redirect directives and access restrictions.

It saved me searching Google for a good few minutes today, so it’s definitely worth checking out.

I’m currently in the process of upgrading my own website, ogston.com, after nearly 12 months of neglect. Due to other project commitments, I haven’t posted anything here since 2008, so it’s long overdue a makeover. Apologies for some broken links and a rather lazy default layout for the next few weeks until i get things sorted.

In the meantime, if you fancy a makeover yourself, i’ve just completed a new website for Face Clinic London, a London-based facial aesthetics clinic offering non-surgical Botox treatments. Check it out – facecliniclondon.com. I’ll be posted more information about the project shortly.

Delicious competitor Magnolia has announced that they will be making their platform open source.

Fantastic! The new version of del.icio.us is finally here!

Not only does CrunchBase have an excellent widget, they now also have an API.

The web was buzzing earlier today as the earlier rumour of Twitter acquiring Twitter search engine Summize was confirmed. The acquisition was rumoured to be close to $15m. Summize now redirects to search.twitter.com. Official announcement here.

WordPress 2.6 is out!

Venturebeat covers the announcement that social bookmarking site reddit goes open source.

Just found an interesting new book on Amazon, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning. Dan Brown explores the theory and practice of creating good documentation for web projects. You can read more about the book on the official website for the book.

It can be quite a chore to find inspiration and best practice when developing online user interfaces, so i thought i’d publish a short lists of lists to some of the best resources to get you out of designer’s block:

• 10 Designer’s Checkpoints To Be Aware Of
• 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
• 12 Excellent Websites to Follow if You’re into Web Design
• 42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read
• CoolHomepages
• My 50 favorite design resources (Pronet Advertising)
• WebMonkey (Yes it’s back!)

Google News or website of a mainstream newspaper…which of the two is better for reading, and discovering, news? Short discussion on what newspapers still don’t understand about the web.