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After moving my website from web host, and moving all my articles I immediately noticed the speed improvement. One thing that halts down a website is the load time, and part of the problem when dealing with load time is large files. Photos, videos, and other media are heavy objects that pulls a lot of bandwidth on our servers and taking them off your server is always a good idea.

I’m currently exploring Amazon’s S3 and sites like Flickr to offload all my images and prevent this way the lags that slow down my website. The problem I have with Flickr is that the company stability is not that great, we all know the rumors of Yahoo sinking and there is no word on what would happen to Flickr if Yahoo disappears. On the other hand Amazon’s S3 problem is cost, It can get very expensive very fast on a popular site.

I’m not sure whether or not the Amazon S3 option is right for me, first of all, the plug-ins available are not that simple to use with WordPress. Since the guys at WordPress like to change things around from time to time is hard to predict whether or not functionality will break on future WordPress releases.

In the meantime, I’m not loading the images back to the posts, they will remain blank for now. If you can suggest any type of plug-in or hack to use external images on with easy within the WordPress admin back-end, please let me know.

In the last MacCast, a podcast about all things Macintosh with Adam Christianson, he asked his listeners to send him a note with their iPhone web usage to do an informal poll. I went to my online AT&T account and screen-print my usage for April for Adam, he just replied to me saying, “Wow you are serious user.”

I started thinking about my data usage and I’m not that bad, I think. My data usage is mostly to check my emails, my NetNewsWire Online account, my bank account, and occasionally to check on news articles, prices for stuff I’m thinking on getting, and playing Bejeweled from PopCat. There is other stuff that I do, but they fall in the rarely used sections so is not worth even to mention them.

Even with all the use I had during the month of April I manage to stay under 300MB, I think that the site that uses most of this bandwidth is NetNewsWire. When I’m checking my RSS entries I notice that most of them have some sort of image attached to it, some of the feeds that I follow are from photo related websites which normally would take a big chunk of bandwidth.

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I downloaded the Aperture free trial over 30 days ego, I finish playing with it and throw it in my computer’s Trash. I’m submitting my review now to make sure you understand that I didn’t get rid of it because it was bad, but because I have no need for it. The software went from a price tag of $299 (USD) to $199, but even with this price drop I feel that this program is not for the aficionado.

The process of getting a trial license was easy and fast, after a couple of minutes I was up and running. Getting it set up was easy too, the first menu you see allows you to choose among a set of options that gives you tutorials, imports, etc. I have a folder with photos that I manage using Bridge from Adobe, so I import those images into Aperture for the test.

The import was fast, you could tell it was doing some cache processing in the background and when it finish it created a proprietary file in my Pictures folder. I wasn’t able to test every single feature, but a couple of the ones I did test impressed me very much.

Lets talk Aperture, the user interface (UI) is great, I was able to click through most of the selections without needing to read the manual. I should mention that I tested Aperture on an Intel Mac mini (1.83GHz with 1GB of RAM) and that was not a problem, I would assume that newer MacBooks and iMacs have no problem dealing with all the features of the software.

The first feature that impressed me was the Loupe tool, I selected high-resolution photos and the Loupe tool took me to the details with in without any problems. I test it with a couple of 3 mega pixels photo that I have on my library and after 200% magnification you can tell is a poor image by its pixilation.

The next feature that wows me was the full screen editing option, I have a 22-inch monitor and my raw images looked amazing. You can all sorts of options to manipulate the images, of course, not ala Photoshop but when manipulating colors, contrast, and brightness is the best you can ask for. The menus hide when in full screen, and just by doing a mouse over the corners of the screen you can activate the menus you need to work on your photos.

Finally, the way you manage your media, so easy that even the most inexperienced user can take advantage of all the features this software has. You have an exceptional organizer on the left side of the screen, you can import directly from your camera, the web or any folder on your computer. You can also export to Flickr, to the web, or create an album, you can import/export from iPhoto and ultimately you can print your own images at home with any of the professional printers available out there.

Of course, what is Aperture with out the community, every Mac owner is proud of belonging to a great family, a family of users that help each other no matter what. For all the help you may need you have Aperture tutorials at www.apple.com/aperture, you also have the Apple discussion forums at http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=184.

You can find user groups as well, there’s an Aperture Foundation that while is not affiliated to Apple Inc is a great resource to any photographer. Find groups at Flickr, as well as a plug-in for Aperture, find about anything just by doing a search in Google for Aperture. If you have knowledge of great places to get Aperture help, tips and tricks, or anything else related to Aperture, feel free to leave a comment including your tip.

We’ve heard so much about the subject already, the truth is that I’m as tired as when the only conversation you’ll hear was iPhone this, iPhone that. Microsoft made a bid on Yahoo for little over 40 Billion dollars, after Yahoo take some time to think about it, we heard that the Yahoo campus is undervaluing Yahoo. The whole thing is one big mess mainly because you would think this kind of offers comes after long periods of discussion, which was not the case.

The funniest part was that many people talk about the subject like it was the end of the world. I got a kick out of some ideas, like some Flickr user group came up with the slogan “Keep your evil grubby hands off our flickr group”, funny indeed but the reality is that several thousand people joined the group.

I was listening to John C. Devorak talk on his show Cranky Geeks arguing about what was the point on Microsoft wanting to buy Yahoo. True above all, I heard someone say somewhere that Microsoft idea of innovation was via acquisition, here is yet another example with the whole Yahoo hostile takeover.

The truth is that I don’t find any of this hostile or troublesome, Yahoo is a great company but the their user base has decline in the last couple of years. Companies like Google among others are giving a good show of market competition. What’s in for Yahoo? What’s in for Microsoft?

Yahoo has a great number of people using Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft’s Hotmail is a big web mail client as well as good Messenger user base. Combined they are definitely bigger than Google since Gmail is not as big as some may think and don’t get me started on Google’s Talk chat client. I’m not saying these Google products are not good, it’s just that people haven’t got around it.

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