This morning while not sleeping at 1:15am like I should be, I found an interesting tool. It's called the Amazon S3 Bucket Explorer.

For a while now I've been using the Firefox S3 Organizer. But, recently I needed to offload some of my FireBloat and dumped that one. So, this might just be a welcome new tool. I'm going to try it out for a while. When I downloaded it, it said it'll stop working in December anyway. But, we'll see what happens by then.

This tool is part of Amazon Web Services and the triple play S3, EC2, SQS. I'll be writing a lot more about these in upcoming entries. But since I'm cranky and tired right now I'll just show you why this tool made me write about it at all. I made me do so because it TAUGHT me something about S3 which I didn't know.

It is extremely easy with this tool to quickly post a file or even HTML page to an S3 bucket and make it world readable. This effectively turns your S3 bucket into a HTML file server.

Here is one I just made a few moments ago to show you its true.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/WebTest/test.html

This, to me, has fun implications for those times when something BIG comes your way traffic-wise and you need to offload some data elsewhere. This is a nice way to scale your ability to host downloads of some kinds of documents.

Update: I later decided to update the html file. When I overwrote it, it reset the permissions. A bit annoying.

I have some other ideas in mind but I'll have to do a bit of test and get back to you later.

And, to give some credit where it's due, I heard about this tool on GigaOM.