Hey, this will be short. Me and my brother just launched our event site, beeets.com, in the Santa Cruz area. Check it out, post events, give feedback. We've been slaving away and we're really excited about it. Thanks!

beeets.com has been launched into open beta!! I know you've all been waiting for this, so lucky you. Users can find events based on their interests.

Some planned features include integration with social networks (a must these days) AND a super SECRET feature that has yet to be announced but will spring us to #1 in a matter of hours. It has yet to be unleashed though.

Anyway, check it out. Jeff and I put a ton of work into getting this ready for John Q Public, and you must swear on the eyes of your children that you will sign up for an account and post events and tell everyone you know RIGHT NOW. Thx lol.

Very cool service. I updated beeets to pull all images from images.beeets.com, an S3 bucket. Also, all css files now go through /css/css.php/file.css which rewrites

url(/images/...)

to

url(http://images.beeets.com/images/...)

And guess what, it all works. I had some bad experiences with the S3Fox firefox plugin in the past, but it's since been updated and I've been using it regularly.

Also, using S3.php, all profile images now go directly onto images.beeets.com. Wicked.

So what does this mean? A few things:

1. Less bandwidth & work - beeets will spend more time serving HTML, CSS, and JS than images.
2. Safer - We were backing up profile images to S3 indirectly before, but the chances of S3 going down VS our hosting are slim.
3. Worse image caching - Before, I had .htaccess controlling all the caching for static files. I liked it that way. S3 doesn't do this very well at all. Apparently it's configurable, but I don't know how...any ideas?

All in all, it should be better for beeets. Maybe we'll actually let users have images bigger than 10x10 now ;)

Thumbs up to S3 (and probably all other Amazon web services).

Lyon Bros. Enterprises, LLC is my brother's and mine business. We started it back in December in an attempt to head up our product-line officially. So far everything is going great. It's a web development company and our main focus is product development, though you wouldn't know it by looking at the number of client projects we've gotten in the past few weeks.

Seems like once we went official, all this great stuff started happening. We're going to be doing some big projects. Jeffrey is going to be in school full time and can't devote much time, so that leaves me. I'll be doing lots of work and making lots of money. Sounds good to me.

In all the glory, we forgot about our baby, beeets, which is still closed beta and waiting for love. We're planning on opening the doors and doing a marketing boom hopefully sometime this week. Exciting stuff.