We have some single teaching posts which are actually a single teaching that is taught over many years. It makes UX sense to try and string these together so a viewer can watch one and move on to the next in the series.

Currently we try to put in a url link to the related teaching posts at the bottom of the post text. But this is quite hit and miss as, for example, you may be working on a post that is say part 3 and you add in links to parts 1 and 2 below it. But then part 4 comes along a few months later and you forget to go back to the other 3 posts and add its link to them. So it gets messy.

What I’m thinking is to add a tag box at the bottom of the custom teaching post edit page where you create and/or assign a post tag for just that teaching series. You give that tag to all the other teaching posts in that series. By doing so, those teaching posts will call all others in place (by teaching date order) to all the posts assigned that tag. So as more posts get the tag, they will automatically show up on all the other posts without having to go back in and manually add them.

There’s no need for these tags to be accessible in the general navigation. its just used for us to group a set of teaching posts.

For example, take this set of teachings from a single text that span 4 years. If we could just assign all these teaching posts with a ‘Treasury-of-Precious-Qualities-10’ tag, they could automatically appear as links at the bottom of the teaching.

So, to demonstrate it on the fourth teaching in that series, it would go from being this, to being like this. Note that the post you are viewing is in grey and not a red link title. So you know where you are in the list.

Is that doable as per the mock up?

Our WP-engine hosting is over its allocated quota of 15gb file storage and is being fined for it monthly.

The site itself has 9gb of files, but the duplicated dev environment copy doubles that to 18gb.

We currently use a paid plugin called Offload media to store and serve the files from a bucket called ‘bodhicharya-websites’ in our AWS S3 account. The plugin itself is managed in the network panel.

It leaves the media files on the host server but copies and links to the ones in S3. It does however give an option to delete the server files, but I have never been brave enough to use it!

That may be a good thing as I just heard from WP-engine that they offer the same media offload service as part of our hosting.

Its called LargeFS. But there are known limitations that may stop us from using both it and even the Offload Media file deletion option. The ones that pertain to us would be:

Gravity Forms – we have a few forms that upload to the hosting and a direct bi-pass to S3.

As we are now a fully fledged website with paying members we really need to partner up with someone who can offer technical support for all the AWS products we use (S3, Cloudfront, IAM etc) and how we connect to them. We’ve been live since 2017 and many things (see below) could do with a review and update, even bucket/folder permissions! The whole thing needs reviewing by someone who knows what they are doing. On top of that, having someone whom we can continue to develop functions with would be great. We just can’t keep up in our voluntary capacity.

Luckily this new service looks the ticket. Just have to find time to put in a request:
https://aws.amazon.com/iq/

How to deliver different sized video files depending on bandwidth or selection using the AWS services.

DAN COMMENT  – Not an automated approach, but I could come up with a solution where the user can choose the quality themselves. Whether to play, 1080p, 920p etc. Just an option, 10 hours from my side, Only caveat is would this mean we need the uploader to upload multiple versions of the videos or does AWS automatically create these?

PAUL – I can’t see a way to do this right now. You can automate parts of it, but it would be such a massive task to re-transcode all the archive video files that just thinking about it makes me want to have a little lie down!

We’d probably need to do it using https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/

I’m also little concerned that some of our buckets have ended up with PUBLIC permissions. I must say that this side of S3 is a fog for me! But perhaps these need to be refined?

AWS emailed me on 22 March 2021 to say:

Hello,

We are writing to notify you that you have configured your S3 bucket(s) to be publicly accessible, and this may be a larger audience than you intended. By default, S3 buckets allow only the account owner to access the contents of a bucket; however, customers can configure S3 buckets to permit public access. Public buckets are accessible by anyone on the Internet, and content in them may be indexed by search engines.

We recommend enabling the S3 Block Public Access feature on buckets if public access is not required. S3 bucket permissions should never allow “Principal”:”*” unless you intend to grant public access to your data. Additionally, S3 bucket ACLs should be appropriately scoped to prevent unintended access to “Authenticated Users” (anyone with an AWS account) or “Everyone” (anyone with Internet access) unless your use case requires it. For AWS’s definition of “Public Access,” please see The Meaning of “Public” [1].

The list of buckets which can be publicly accessed is below:

teachings-archive | eu-west-1
online-shedra | eu-west-1

You can ensure individual buckets, or all your buckets prevent public access by turning on the S3 Block Public Access feature [2]. This feature is free of charge and it only takes a minute to enable. For step by step instructions on setting up S3 Block Public Access via the S3 management console, see Jeff Barr’s blog [3], or check out the video tutorial on Block Public Access [4].

If you have a business need to maintain some level of public access, please see Overview of Managing Access [5] for more in-depth instructions on managing access to your bucket to make sure you’ve permitted the correct level of access to your objects. If you would like more information about policy configuration in S3, please refer to Managing Access in Amazon S3 [6], and S3 Security Best Practices [7].

We recommend that you make changes in accordance with your operational best practices.

If you believe you have received this message in error or if you require technical assistance, please open a support case[8].

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/access-control-block-public-access.html#access-control-block-public-access-policy-status
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/access-control-block-public-access.html
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-block-public-access-another-layer-of-protection-for-your-accounts-and-buckets/
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/features/block-public-access/
[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/access-control-overview.html#access-control-resources-manage-permissions-basics
[6] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/s3-access-control.html
[7] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/security-best-practices.html
[8] https://aws.amazon.com/support

Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com is a registered trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. This message was produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services Inc., 410 Terry Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98109-5210

—
Reference: https://phd.aws.amazon.com/phd/home#/event-log?Event%20ARN=arn:aws:health:global::event/S3/AWS_S3_SECURITY_NOTIFICATION/AWS_S3_SECURITY_NOTIFICATION_6b0820d3-e043-4976-aeec-b25338814e78&eventID=arn:aws:health:global::event/S3/AWS_S3_SECURITY_NOTIFICATION/AWS_S3_SECURITY_NOTIFICATION_6b0820d3-e043-4976-aeec-b25338814e78&eventTab=details&layout=vertical

archivists-inbox

This will become a ’transit lounge’ or quarantine area for all incoming media. The
current S3Bubble uploader (to be replaced by our own version) allows members to
upload teaching media here where it will remain until it is checked and moved to the
new original-media-store Bucket instead. Also, any future uploads that Rinpoche
sends in using the DropShare app will also go here to await processing in the
Rinpoches-Uploads Folder.

bodhicharya-website-backups

Simply storage of website backups of the whole Bodhicharya wordpress multi-site
generated by the BackupBuddy plugin. This happens automatically on a schedule. [No longer used]

bodhicharya-websites

All media files for the websites are also stored on AWS S3 in the bodhicharyawebsites
bucket. These are called into place by the Offload S3 plugin which is editable
in the main Network Admin area.

online-shedra

This is media relating to COURSES on the website. I would rather use a bucket
named “courses” but its not possible to rename this one as we are already using
media inside it for the Bodhicharyavatara audio teachings. So it will probably remain
as it is now.

original-media-store

This is the main long term deep store of all original recordings. Our “Glacier” storage
bucket. Both the historical teachings that Arne has (which we are now transcoding for
long term storage) and all future original recordings sent in (via the archivists-inbox).
It will use the same year then teaching folder structure that the teachings-archive uses.
Everything in here will be set to lifecycle into Glacier storage after a set amount of
days (probably 30). Therefore I intend to upload our drive submission to Amazon
directly into this bucket so all the original teachings are ready to be stored in Glacier.
After a big drive upload we will just move the transcoded web versions of the videos
over to the teachings-archive for use on the website.

teachings-archive

This contains all the transcoded media for use on the website. Organised in year
folders on the first level. Then, in folders within the year folders, are teaching folders
which are either manually made (via S3 console) or made by the teachings post
uploader (our custom plugin made by Johan). The media in here are delivered to the
website using Cloudfront.

It would be wonderful to be able to add transcriptions of teachings to the Archive for a number of reasons:

1. Improving search-ability of content from within the website.
2. Improving indexing for google searches
3. For use as video captions
4. For future use as the basis of translated captions in other languages.

This is very much an intention for the future. But looking at things like the new Amazon Transcribe and Translate products, this has already become a reality. We simply lack the development know how when it comes to automating such a process.

We currently have 3 SNS topics to notify us when someone has uploaded something to the archivists-inbox or an elastictranscode is complete:

1. Ger-upload – arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:838863534535:Ger-upload
2. rinpoche-uploads – arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:838863534535:rinpoche-uploads
3. transcode-complete – arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:838863534535:transcode-complete

Trouble is that each automated message is a bunch of unintelligible code like this:

{"Records":[{"eventVersion":"2.0","eventSource":"aws:s3","awsRegion":"eu-west-1","eventTime":"2018-04-18T13:06:48.904Z","eventName":"ObjectCreated:Put","userIdentity":{"principalId":"AWS:AIDAIRG54DEMCHGQIO6IE"},"requestParameters":{"sourceIPAddress":"89.99.183.67"},"responseElements":{"x-amz-request-id":"CFD7DF5671F0142A","x-amz-id-2":"ILWTJerOamH/2XvFmxNdgsbgc+su2unNv14kBx1L0Juay+zAhS53q+Y5qeVP3cmJqwHEmWzlxlM="},"s3":{"s3SchemaVersion":"1.0","configurationId":"Ger made an upload","bucket":{"name":"archivists-inbox","ownerIdentity":{"principalId":"A3LPHNFI3588LW"},"arn":"arn:aws:s3:::archivists-inbox"},"object":{"key":"ger_reinders/2010+mila2%3Dintro+test%3D+16-9+12mbps%2C+please+try+wether+this+mp4+plays+in+the+archive+post.mp4","size":2491458,"eTag":"1c873cd6043b33b86b01c1792c853473","sequencer":"005AD742E6B5E3B596"}}}]}

Is there a way to customise these messages so we know what they mean. Or is there a better way to get notified?

Same applies you the message when Rinpoche uploads

DAN COMMENT – Where does this code come to? I can format this into something readible but would need to know where it is received? 3 hours from my side

PAUL – More about it here Dan: https://aws.amazon.com/sns