To do what you’re after, I think you’d want to either use a PHP script to generate your URL for you, or generate the URL by some other means. Its been a while, but there were some free S3 clients that ran on windows back when I worked on this that would let you right click on an item in your S3 storage, and generate a URL for you with an expiration. So basically using one of these S3 Windows Clients (I’m sure there must be an equivalent for OSX as well) you can upload a file to S3, and generate a URL for it. I’m sorry I can not be more specific, as I haven’t used any desktop S3 clients in a while.

I’m a tiny little non-programmer who wants to give away free downloads of songs to people who sign up for my mailing list. I thought I’d create URLs using query string authentication to do this, and periodically update my mailing list autoresponder so that anyone who gets the URL would have say a week or two to get the file, then the link goes bad, so they can’t share it — so only people who keep signing up can get the links.

But I have no secure server, I’m not a programmer, etc. I get the concept fine enough, but I have no clue where or how to actually create the URLs.

I wondered if S3Fox might be able to, but I don’t think it has that functionality. I see someone has written a WP plugin — http://codepolice.net/index.php/2008/12/08/generate-expiring-urls-for-amazon-s3-via-a-wordpress-plugin/ — but I don’t want the URLs showing up on my WP pages/posts, I want to create them to put only in emails to my mailing list, plus I’d be concerned that the use of the Secret Key might not be secure with such a plugin.

Any thoughts on a quick and painless path to what I’m after?