Mypapit GNU/Linux blog is now served with CloudFlare!

After long and careful consideration, I decided to enable CloudFlare for my blog.

CloudFlare is a content delivery network which aims to enhance website security and performance. CloudFlare CDN offers protection againts many forms of malicious activity including: spammers, email harvesters, SQL Injection, XSS, denial-of-service attack and suspicious web requests. Therefore saving valueable bandwidth from the web hosting machine.

My Personal Experience with CloudFlare
After a while using CloudFlare, I’ve notice that:

  • My site uses less bandwidth
  • The php-fcgi uses less (valueable RAM)
  • Less comment spam received from blogs
  • Site loads faster, not prone to being bogged down during peak hour

So far, so good, I love using CloudFlare…

Rant: About Starting up an E-commerce Site….

A bit of advice when starting up an e-commerce (especially storefront) site, please use proper e-commerce software for the job. Do not ‘force’ a general-purpose (CMS) to be an e-commerce site via plugins (or *cough* *cough* ‘component’), it’s gonna be a pain-in-the-ass to secure ’em.

So do yourself (and the sysadmin guys) a favor, use a proper e-commerce software platform or just turn to blogger.com for selling your stuffs…

Where all the Blog XML RPC ping sites have gone…?

I found out something interesting when I’ve gone through my WordPress setting, it seems that the once famous XML-RPC ping sites are either out-of-service or have been taken down.

The one standing up until today is Ping-o-Matic and venerable Weblogs (the first blog XML-RPC ping service).

I once tried to run one of such services to in order to study spam blogs behavior, but it ends up eating too much server resources with too much noise coming from all the submission, I ended the experiment just over one-year.

Probably this is what happening around the world, ping sites gotten shut-down because of being overwhelmed. The remaining option of promoting blog posts is through social status updating site such as Facebook, Twitter and Buzz (also identi.ca!).

How to login into OpenID sites Anonymously

OpenID is a standard that allows users to be authenticated in a decentralized manner. OpenID enables user to be identified across the internet using a single unified OpenID identifier (or account).

However some websites (particularly blog and forums) insist users to login in order to leave a short comment or remarks which sometimes is not convenient for some users that value anonymity.

OpenID Tango

The OpenID Anonymity service is an OpenID provider that helps you get around website or application that requires OpenID login. To use OpenID Anonymity service, the user only need to key in its URL Identifier – http://openid.anonymity.com/some_random_id and the user will be automatically authenticated, without the need to log-in or to enter password, which is very convenient if one needs to be anonymous.

Try it!

p/s: Additionally here’s a collection of Public Domain OpenID (tangofied) icons, created by Jakub Szypulka

Google Friend Connect is back at Mypapit GNU/Linux Blog

Google Friends Connect (GFC) Widget is finally back at Mypapit GNU/Linux blog sidebar! Users now can elect to follow the blog updates publicly or privately on the GFC widget and can even invite friends to join in together.

Why not Facebook fan pages?
While I myself have a Facebook account, I strongly disagree with Facebook move to discontinue the use of certain of their older application API almost abruptly. This gives a bad impression to me that Facebook can suddenly changed their mind about Facebook Platform (the one that powered Facebook Fan Pages) and discontinuing part of the API in the future.

On the other hand, please Follow my blog for the latest updates!