March 2012 Summaries

On March 31, 2012, Damon Billian announced that Cloudflare had released a new account interface after several months of beta testing. The update included multiple enhancements such as adding multiple sites at once, easier navigation to Cloudflare Reporting and Threat Control, improved pages for Settings, and grouped security and performance settings. The new UI aimed to provide users with quicker access to frequently used features and improve the overall user experience.

On March 27th, John Roberts proposed an idea for a CloudFlare app to support Earth Hour on the upcoming Saturday, March 31st. Although time was limited, Katie G., a UK-based developer, took up the challenge and managed to create the app within 48 hours. The free Earth Hour app is now available to all CloudFlare customers, allowing their websites to go dark for an hour on March 31st with a message about Earth Hour. Katie's work has also helped improve the developer platform. More information about this platform will be released soon, and developers are encouraged to create globally-deployable apps for CloudFlare-powered sites without operational costs.

Content scraping is a common issue faced by publishers, where their original content is copied and republished on other websites without permission. This automated process often involves bots that grab the content and republish it onto link farm sites. To combat this problem, CloudFlare has introduced ScrapeShield, an app designed to detect, defend against, and deter content scrapers. The app uses invisible tracking beacons in the content, which are pulled by automated bots when they scrape the content. This helps publishers identify where their content is being republished. Additionally, CloudFlare's Maze feature redirects known content scrapers to a virtual labyrinth of gibberish and gobbledygook, consuming their resources without affecting the publisher's site. ScrapeShield also includes an option to add the no-pinning meta tag to prevent images from being pinned on sites like Pinterest.

On March 28, 2012, CloudFlare announced its connection to HKIX (Hong Kong Internet Exchange), the largest internet exchange in Asia. This partnership allows for faster performance for web surfers in Hong Kong by keeping traffic local and reducing latency. As part of their ongoing efforts to bring the internet closer to users, CloudFlare plans to announce more updates throughout 2012.

Zoompf is a cloud-based tool offering on-demand web performance testing and optimization through its Zoompf Performance Report available as a CloudFlare App for $5. The report analyzes websites for over 100 performance issues, generating a detailed PDF with actionable information to improve page load times, user satisfaction, revenue, and operational costs. Unlike free tools, Zoompf provides comprehensive analysis of large portions of the website, testing for more than 100 different performance issues, and offering detailed remediation information.

On March 27, CloudFlare co-founders Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway will share the story of how their company started at the Harvard Club of San Francisco's Founders Series. The talk will be led by Professor Noam Wasserman, an entrepreneurship expert from Harvard Business School. Anyone interested in attending can find more information on the event website.

Matthew Prince from CloudFlare mentions that a group of them will be attending SXSW, an interactive, music, and film festival in Austin. They have been supporting SXSW for some time by ensuring the panel picker website stays online during high traffic periods. Several startups launching at SXSW are using CloudFlare to maintain their websites' availability. Prince hints that there might be a new Twitter or Foursquare emerging from this year's festival, and encourages other startups attending SXSW to sign up for CloudFlare to ensure their services stay online.

The text provides a guide for new and current users of CloudFlare, an online platform designed to speed up and protect websites. It outlines recommended steps such as temporarily deactivating the service when issues arise, installing mod_cloudflare to preserve IP information, creating PageRules to enhance performance and configuration options, familiarizing oneself with CloudFlare settings, exploring the CloudFlare App Store for additional services, searching the Knowledge Base for frequently asked questions, and following the company on social media platforms.

CloudFlare, a company that supports the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, has helped keep it online during high traffic periods. Several members of the CloudFlare team will be attending the event and participating in various panels and talks. These include "Javascript Performance MythBusters™", "Scaling to Infinity: Dealing with Rocket Growth", "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Backwards in Heels" featuring female entrepreneurs, and "Surviving Lulz: Behind the Scenes of LulzSec".

On March 1st, 2012, Matthew Prince from Cloudflare announced that they have started supporting other standard ports used by web control panels in addition to ports 80 and 443. This covers most major control panels and aims to make the service easier for users. However, traffic through these ports will not be cached or optimized. The company also clarified that it cannot support protocols like FTP and SSH due to their lack of a HOST header. Instead, users must access these services using an IP address or subdomain marked as Cloudflare disabled in the DNS manager. This adds an extra layer of security by preventing direct exposure of the origin server to traffic over these ports.