Technology Insights

Update WordPress Amazon Product in a Post Plugin 2.X to Amazon Product in a Post Plugin 3.X

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If you use the Amazon Product In A Post Plugin on WordPress you might have either not upgraded yet or decided to not upgrade because the shortcode syntax has changed. You can get around not upgrading by updating the WordPress post content immediately after you upgrade the Amazon Product In A Post Plugin. Below I describe the version that I upgraded and the MySQL syntax used to update the shortcode syntax to display Amazon products in WP posts.

Technology Insights

RackSpace Cloud DNS Round Robin DNS A Records

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I typically use Amazon’s AWS EC2 cloud services which include Route53 for DNS however I have certain clients that prefer RackSpace and therefore require RackSpace Cloud DNS services. One of the primary reasons for not just using an external DNS service such as Amazon’s Route53 DNS service is because when you setup large cloud deployments you typically are going to need internal DNS entries for communication between cloud instances and DNS services such as Route53 will not respond externally to RFC1918 or private IP space for those DNS entries. Anyhow one thing that is well documented or easy to accomplish on Route53 is creating A records with multiple IP’s for round robin DNS which provides a cheap easy to configure load balancing of sorts for different services such as MySQL. I could not find any documentation or mention of round robin DNS setup on RackSpace Cloud DNS so I wanted to explain how I was able to accomplish this.

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Create And Mount Amazon AWS EC2 EBS Storage To AWS EC2 Linux Instance

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Amazon’s AWS products are pretty amazing and allow you to scale with ease for short or long term projects. One thing that can be helpful is mounting extra storage to AWS instances so you have the ability to unmount the storage and mount to different instances in the future. The other benefit is the ability to terminate an Amazon AWS instance and keep the Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume to use on another AWS instance at a later date. Use the directions below to create an Amazon EC2 EBS volume, attach the volume to an Amazon AWS instance, format the volume, and then mount the volume to the instance.

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Amazon Machine Tags WordPress Plugin Not Working, Easy Switch To Amazon Product In A Post Plugin

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I have been using the Amazon Machine Tags WordPress plugin on numerous sites for a long time and have been happy with the results up until the last couple of months. I believe that Amazon has made some changes to their API over the last year or so and it has caused a lot of issues with the Amazon Machine Tags plugin. I even wrote this article in mid February discussing a work around that would allow the Amazon Machine Tags plugin to continue working until the developer was able to make some changes. Since that time I have been monitoring my posts to see if the Amazon products are always displaying and unfortunately even with the fix mentioned in the February article items were still not displaying at all times. Below I noted an alternative that provides solid functionality.