Amazon S3 Browser for Live Writer

For about a year now I've been using Amazon S3 services.  Mostly I'm using it for image storage for my blog and web site.  I decided to stop using Flickr for screenshot stuff and keep it to 'photographs' when I can.  I signed up for an S3 account and have been using it for screenshot type stuff since then.  If you don't know, S3 is a service that basically enables 'object' storage in the cloud.  An object can be anything really, but I'm treating it like a remote host for images.

The one thing Amazon doesn't provide themselves is a tool to manage your account...it is really an API only.  There are plenty out there that have implemented user interfaces around S3 services.  My two favorites are the S3 plugin for Firefox and BucketExplorer.  I use the Firefox one more than anything for uploading just because it was faster for what I needed.

UPDATE: While I still use the Firefox extension and always have it installed, I find myself using CloudBerry Explorer a LOT more.  It is the most full-featured (free) Amazon S3 tool I've seen and I love it.  They keep adding little subtle things to that make my process even easier!  Check it out today!

But the problem is that neither of the tools really incorporated *why* I was using S3 for me, which was primarily with my blog.  So a year ago I grabbed some of the sample code from the S3 developer site and whipped up a quick-and-dirty plugin for Windows Live Writer that I've been using.  I already had my Flickr4Writer plugin that I used for Flickr, but like I mentioned, I was using S3 for other image hosting now.  I was lazy though and only did a read version that inserted an image.  I was still relying on the other tools to upload, change permissions, etc. -- my workflow sucked.

Well as a part of The Code Trip, we set goals to release projects on CodePlex.  I decided to put this project out on CodePlex as far as I had it.  I immediately had a partner in Aaron Lerch.  He jumped in and within a day basically put in the remaining features that were lacking.

The result is the S3 Browser for Windows Live Writer project:

The initial 0.91 beta release is available on the project now.  Please give it a spin if you are a Live Writer and Amazon S3 user!