After having recently audited a web application for proper character encoding support, I have one piece of advice for web developers in this area and that is: you should always support UTF-8 encoding across the board right from the start.

If you just take a few steps at the beginning of a project to enable Unicode encoding, you won’t ever have to worry about international character support, your application is “future-proofed.” When the time comes for your application to go global, it’s ready to go.

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I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with Amazon Web Services. Over the past few weeks I have been developing a simple way to manage multi-node applications using EC2. Much of this is very project-specific but the methodology could easily be applied to a wide variety of deployments. The techniques described here were inspired by this blog post. This article is intended for people who are already somewhat familiar with Amazon Web Services — for a brief introduction to S3 and EC2, view my previous blog post. If you’re ready for it, read on.

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