filicio.us blog

We’re proud to launch a new feature at filicio.us: Users no longer need their own Amazon AWS account to sign up and use filicio.us. Instead we’re now offering to account choises:

• Simple accounts: Use filicio.us on it’s own and pay filicio.us directly for your usage. The price model is much the same a Amazon’s, but we need to charge a bit more than Amazon to have it make economic sense to handle payments. The great thing about the simple account is that you don’t need to sign up with Amazon and then provide filicio.us with you secret key just to get going…
• Advanced account: The choice for the advanced user who wants to be billed through Amazon AWS, as before.

The new signup model makes filicio.us much easier to use, and we’re still the cheapest choice around:

Download/GB: $0.25

Upload/GB: $0.50

Storage/GB/month: $0.20

This basically means that you pay-as-you-go just as with Amazon. This makes for a much more flexible choice than other storage services around since users won’t need to choose between three uncomfortable pricing packages. You pay for usage and that’s it!

To make sure that new users know what they’re paying for they’ll get a sign-up bonus of $0.15 when they start out. This roughly corresponds to 60MB of free storage for year.

(By the way, this introduction marks the beginning of a quite a few changes in the upcoming weeks and months. Hopefully, this will make filicio.us a very attrative option for backup, storage and file sharing.)

Amazon S3 provides a great hosting service for podcast files: It’s fast and it’s cheap. So with the recent addition of RSS feeds to filicio.us we’ve actually got a fully integrated solution for the podcasters our there. (Including support for BitTorrent feeds.)

Putting a podcast online is a simple matter of uploading the audio file to filicio.us and then, possibly, tagging it. That’s it. And remember that you can upload multiple files at once and editing while the upload is finishing. Just in case that seems hard, we’ve put together a short guide on How To Podcast With Filicio.us.

We’ve just added RSS to filicio.us, so all (public) files can now be downloaded via feeds. Feed URLs look like this:

• http://filicio.us/rss/demo/ (most recent public files published by demo)
• http://filicio.us/rss/demo/podcast (most recent public files published by demo tagged podcast)
• http://filicio.us/torrentrss/demo (most recent public files published by demo, but for BitTorrent applications)

This is the easy way of getting the standard rss feeds. In fact, the feeds has been added as a part of the filicio.us API, which means than any API request with format=rss specified will be returned as RSS. A few examples:

• http://filicio.us/get-files?format=rss&username=demo&password=demo&limit=100&orderby=creation_date&order=desc (Get all the 100 most recent files — private and public — uploaded by demo)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?format=rss&username=demo&mode=search&search=superman (Get a list of demo’s public files where either the filename or the description includes the string “superman”)

(And yes, I realize that it’s time to actually write some API documentation. This thing has grown out of the sparse blog doc.)

(Refer to this blog post for an introduction of the api, and a listing of the basic options)
I’ve added a few more options to the “api”, which means that you can now retrieve a list of private files through the api (by sending the password that goes with the username, obviously), and you’re no longer limited to listing files by only one tag.

This means that you can now:

• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=demo&password=demo (get demo’s private and public files)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=tag&tag=ip&tag=egnenoter&tagmode=or (list all of my files tagged either ip or egnenoter)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=tag&tag=ip&tag=egnenoter&tagmode=and (list all of my files tagged ip and egnenoter)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=demo&mode=tag&tag=first&tag=second&password=demo (list all demo’s files — private and public — tagged either first or second)

Ajaxian.com mentions filicio.us in the context of a discussion of the possibilities for using S3 together with JavaScript.

If you really want to be Web 2.0 these days, true ajax’ing (as in fullfilling the holy trinity by doing async, javascript and xml at once) is not enough: You also need an api. And when you’ve got the xml thing down, you’re almost there, so after a few minutes of hacking, we’re ready to introduce our very own file sharing api.

Another very important part of the whole Web 2.0 universe is sparse documentation, so we’ll simply explain the api with a few links to my public files:

• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=user_recent (30 most recent files)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=untagged
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=tag&tag=metode

(There’s probably more to come, but this should illustrate the basics…)

I’ve just added preliminary support for an added layer of openness at filicio.us: You can now browse other user’s public files through the web interface. The UI is exactly the same, although many actions have been disabled (since, obviously, you can’t delete other user’s files or add metadata such as tags).

For demonstration purposes, look at http://filicio.us/steffentchr or http://filicio.us/demo.

We’re planning to add a few more feature in the coming days, weeks, and months:

• Support filenames language specific chars, such as Danish ÆØÅ.
• Newly uploaded files should show up at the top of the list.
• Fix the multiple-upload-tags-Flash problem.
• Search filenames and file descriptions.
• Form-based upload for those without Flash 8.
• Allow others to browse your public files through http://filicio.us/username.
• RSS feeds of public files tagged mytag at http://filicio.us/rss/username/mytag & http://filicio.us/rss/mytag.
• Add RSS links within the UI.
• Sorting listings by filename, creation date, …
• Select more than one tag at a time.
• Batch operations: Private/Public, Delete, Tag, … (I’m thinking drag-n-drop for this one)
• Keyboard shortcuts for navigation.
• Setting the timeout of signed links.
• Upload directly to Amazon S3, rather than through filicio.us.
• Guide to signup at Amazon S3, and a few cases on how to use filicio.us. (Case suggestions: podcasting, note sharing, keeping state secrets accessible…?)
• Plain html version for mobiles and non-Ajax devices/browsers.
• Syncing buckets with S3, so every object in a bucket is present in out systems.
• Shared buckets amongst users? More buckets for one account?

Any requests? Add a comment…

A month or so ago Amazon launched it’s file storage service named S3. The gist of it: Host all your files in one place, have them be accessible from everywhere and only pay for the storage and bandwidth used. And it very affordable at $0.20 per GB you transfer (upload or download) and $0.15 per GB per month for storage. For you as an ordinary user there’s one glitch though: It’s not designed for you! There’s no (web) interface for uploading, downloading and organizing your files.

This is the exact gap that filicio.us is designed to fix. filicio.us is a simple file storage service built using Amazon S3. You can register for an account with S3, and then use our service for uploading your files, organizing them using tags and sharing them with others. In essence , we’re providing a thin shell between you and S3 — and ajax superpowered one at that — which allows you to actually use S3 for your own purpose.

Now, if you want to know more, have a look at our nice About filicio.us document (this document also details how you can try out the service without signing up). Or if you can’t wait to get started, go to filicio.us and create a free account.

We’ve recently created a file service, filicio.us, based on Amazon’s new Simple Storage Service (S3).