Wik.is–our free hosted wiki site–finally made the switchover to not only use Amazon S3 for filestorage but also to allow users to download content directly from S3! Why should you care? Speed! Larger attachments should download much quicker now since you’ll be downloading them directly from Amazon’s data centers rather than our servers slowing it down by being the middleman.

A big thanks to Mike Culver, an evangelist with Amazon web services, for stopping by our office one day and letting us know that this is possible!

Note that nothing changes in the way you should upload or link to images/attachments. If the file is uploaded to the wiki, continue to link directly to the file and don’t worry about S3. When a browser goes to download the file, a redirect to S3’s server is returned with a special temporary signature and expiration that allows the browser to download the file. You may need to tell your users that if they’re sharing a link to the attachment to not share the redirected url to Amazon but rather use the url to the file attachment on the wiki itself. The redirected url currently expires in 1 minute! With these autoexpiring links you can be sure that your uploaded attachments are safe and secure even if you attach to private pages.

If you have a wiki hosted on wik.is, there’s nothing you need to do to enable this as it’s already been applied for every wiki.

Questions or issues? Let us know here or in this thread.

categories: Deki Wiki, MindTouch