March 2011 Summaries

The author shares their long-standing appreciation for Metallica since 1986, highlighting how the band influenced heavy metal and rock music. They recount attending two of Metallica's concerts in 1988 and 2003, noting that the band remained tight and impressive over time. Recently, Metallica signed up for CloudFlare service to enhance security, reduce server load, and improve website speed for their worldwide fan base.

In February 2011, CloudFlare relocated its headquarters from Palo Alto to San Francisco's SOMA district, expanding workspace and proximity to other startups. The new office features a freight elevator, graffiti elephant, and ping pong table. Four new team members joined the company: Terry, Jason, Kristin, and intern Jocelyn. CloudFlare aims to improve website performance and security, and encourages talented individuals to apply for open positions on their careers page.

A2 Hosting, a cloud hosting partner of Cloudflare, explains how the latter helps their customers. They use an analogy involving pizza delivery to describe the benefits of using Cloudflare's content delivery network (CDN). Just as a pizza delivery company would set up restaurants closer to its customers for faster service, Cloudflare delivers website content from servers closest to site visitors, improving loading speed and overall user experience. A2 Hosting has integrated Cloudflare's CDN solution directly into their hosting control panel for easy accessibility.

The CloudFlare team has released a beta version of their Joomla extension, designed to enhance the user experience when using both Joomla and CloudFlare together. This extension restores original visitor IPs in server logs, which were previously replaced by CloudFlare's proxy IP addresses. Users who have already installed mod_cloudflare on their servers do not need to install this extension but can benefit from having it at both the Joomla and server levels. The plugin is compatible with Joomla 1.5.2, but does not include spam reporting or database optimization features found in the CloudFlare WordPress plugin. Feedback on the extension is encouraged for future improvements.

On March 12, 2011 at 12:56 AM, Matthew Prince reported that the CloudFlare team recently opened their new San Francisco office for an open house and loft party. The event featured live entertainment by local band The Peelers, as well as food from San Francisco street cart vendors. Photos of the event, which included the entire CloudFlare team and many users, have been posted online. The company hopes to see even more attendees at future events.

On September 27, 2010, CloudFlare was launched publicly at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and received recognition as the Most Innovative Company. The company has since been invited by TechCrunch to provide an update on its progress. In response, a humorous video depicting a typical day in the CloudFlare office was created to showcase their fun-loving culture while maintaining focus on web performance and security. Open positions within the company are currently available for interested candidates.

On March 2nd, 2011, CloudFlare added support for multiple languages on their challenge page, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. They plan to release Czech, Estonian, Indonesian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Ukrainian, and Urdu in the next two weeks. The language displayed is determined by the visitor's browser settings, defaulting to English if unsupported. CloudFlare intends to continue expanding their supported languages and encourages proficient translators to contribute.