Moving on from the success of BuyLatr, I’ve been playing around with other ways to make bargain hunting and online shopping easier. Today I’m launching the beta of “GoogAzon” – an extension for the Flock and Firefox browsers that adds related Amazon search results to the same Google results page.

It starts with an unobtrusive orange bar (yes, I love orange):

And expands into a listing of the top 10 items (complete with Image Preview tooltips):

Planned enhancements include price comparison (showing the lowest prices from Amazon and other sites), support for Yahoo/MSN search results… and whatever else the users ask for. We’re using UserVoice again for feedback, after our great experience on the BuyLatr.com website.

Some of you may note that I’ve stolen the “SpandexFox” brand from myself (previously the name of an expanded ElasticFox extension). I’ve been invited by Amazon to contribute patches to ElasticFox directly, and frankly the name seemed much cooler than a “Dashboard for managing EC2 instances”. This way, it can be all about making your browsing experience… tighter. Oh, and yes – pictures of “Megan Fox” in Spandex are definitely a possibility.

Everyone on the internet uses email.

I’ve played around with http://identitu.de, which takes your Facebook account, and turns it into an OpenID. Which is wickedly cool – if you have a Facebook account.

But what if all you have, is email? Could we take email accounts, and verify them (using IMAP or POP3), and present THAT as your digital identity?

I think we can. Watch this space for my attempt.

It never gets simpler.

I started out with a shared hosting account with ProWebSites.com (long defunct), for almost $30 per month. Traffic and storage were measured in megabytes, those days, and no one even talked much about “up-time”.

When I started working at Ramsbottoms Computers in Nelson, I took over their “web hosting” department – which involved a bunch of local businesses, hosted off of an overbuilt desktop machine sitting on the desk in the back room. The best thing I did for them was get that server rebuilt into a rack-mounted box, and tucked into colocation in the only data-center in town.

Sometime early in 2000 I put my own server together, in the basement of an office building in Iowa. (It’s still there, actually.) Since then it’s been a succession of colo boxes, self-managed hosting… I’ve even run a couple of data centers.

Last week, the hard-drive started failing in one of my ServerBeach servers.
This, really, was the last straw.

I’ve had billing issues. I’ve had trouble-ticket issues. They won’t return phone calls (although they do reply to email – excessively. Usually I get a blank copy of any email I send to them – 10 minutes before I get an actual reply.) Now I’m getting hardware failures – I’m done. I’m leaving.

I decided it was time for EC2 – until I realized that the hosting services built on it where $500 a month minimum, and the alternative seemed to be a weird set of windows command line tools.

I went whining to Jesse Andrews:

4:52:13 PM JustJosh: do you know the gandi people?
4:52:18 PM JustJosh: can I get an invite?
4:52:57 PM jesse: ahh, that is new
4:53:00 PM jesse: have no invites
4:53:03 PM JustJosh: fucl
4:53:15 PM jesse: ec2 might be better for you
4:53:20 PM jesse: since you need more than a $8 slice
4:53:31 PM JustJosh: yeah
4:54:01 PM JustJosh: but I don’t really have time to figure out ec2 instances
4:54:24 PM jesse: install elasticfox
4:54:31 PM jesse: you can have a new slice in minutes
4:54:41 PM JustJosh: looking into it now
5:16:18 PM JustJosh: help
5:16:24 PM JustJosh: what AMI should I start with?
5:16:27 PM JustJosh: there are a PILE of them

Etc, etc.

Let me start out by saying that ElasticFox ROCKS – James Greenfield took an entirely broken experience, and managed to make it only MOSTLY broken.

But there was one absolutely critical function that elasticfox DIDN’T do – save an AMI image of your running instance, back to S3.

So I added it.

There are a lot of caveats, of course – I’m still hacking wildly. No guarantees on anything but Mac. But seriously, it’s a lot better than the alternative.

Go download it, and try it out.

PS – SpandexFox.com is running on EC2.

PPS – EC2 got elastic storage today – SpandexFox will have support SOON, I promise.

Gas Tracker is a Twitter hack which allows a follower to tweet basic gas usage information to gain a greater insight into ones driving habits.

For example, let’s assume that I am at the gas station to fill up my tank. It cost $47.43 for 14.23 gallons to fill your tank and my odo odometer reading is 74,345 miles. After I am following @gastracker I send it a direct message:

d gastracker $47.43 14.23g 74345

Over time, simple twitters to update your activity while at the pump will allow you to log in and visualize your driving behavior showing such graphs as rate of mileage accumulation and miles per gallon. We have some visions on how this will evolve with increased functionality, but in the spirit of TinyApps, we have to ship it to get some feedback.

Once you follow Gas Tracker on Twitter, you will receive a direct message welcoming you Gas Tracker and giving you instructions to go to the Gas Tracker Website. At the website, you will enter your Twitter name and Gas Tracker will direct tweet you a password. With this password, you’ll then be able log in and view your driving behavior. Do be patient, as the more data you input, the more meaningful the analysis will be.

Enjoy, and please do give us some feedback.

This script assists you to enter your contacts when twittering. Twitter Auto Complete shows your contacts to the left of your update box when you enter an ‘@’. While you recall who you were trying to include in your message, this script auto completes your contact when only one option is remaining.

The grease monkey script is hosted on userscripts.org and you can download it here. Thank you, Josh, for stepping me through this process and for not letting Todd_Zero know where he stands on the totem pole; he very well may weep.