Update (August 2, 2019): In case it is not obvious – this post is a joke! To the best of my knowledge – and I have a high level of confidence about this – no space aliens are being held captive at Area 51. Please do not storm area 51 based on this post.
WordPress is awesome but could it be even better by incorporating space alien technology? Of course it could.
cPanel is easily the king of the hill when it comes to web hosting control panels. It is, in a word, awesome. It gives me an intuitive interface to simplify the process of managing my site. cPanel had its origin in the late 1990s. With ongoing improvements it became the default hosting control panel of choice early in the millennium, and remains so today. But likely not tomorrow.
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I launched my first website way back at the dawn of the millennium. It features public domain literature. From the start, it cried out for text-to-speech capability, but I could find no practical solution. I could have recorded my reading of each page in an audio file, but that would have been way too time consuming and storage-intensive (at the time, disk space was dear).
In addition to my crazy long Cloudflare firewall “block” rule, I use a JavaScript challenge rule for pages that I want to restrict to human users, keeping out bots.
On Cloudflare’s free tier I am allowed five firewall rules. This is very generous of Cloudflare, considering the free part. But it turns out to be much more generous than it first appears.
I am by no means an expert on WordPress or web development in general, but I have dabbled for quite a while and have stumbled onto some things that might be of interest.
Robots dot text (robots.txt) is a really interesting, conflicted, frequently disrespected – but useful – little file. Its intended purpose is to give me control of how bots visit my site. Depending on the bot though, my robots dot text directives might be obeyed, ignored, partially obeyed, and/or interpreted in different ways.
Big shout out to McAfee SiteAdvisor for quickly correcting their assessment of this site and one of my other sites.
A bit of background ….
My first website, byGosh.com – launched at the dawn of the millennium – features public domain literature. It includes all the classic stories for kids. I rewrote parts of many kid’s stories to remove the violence. Red Riding Hood is rescued by her grandmother who chases the wolf away with a broom, Jack returns the harp and lets the giant climb back up before cutting down the beanstalk, none of the three little pigs get eaten – even the wolf lives happily ever after, and so on.
Update 2020-01-02: In its latest Transparency Report, dated December 20, 2019, Cloudflare killed a key canary. The third bullet in the list below, “Cloudflare has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure”, is … well, to paraphrase the great Monty Python parrot skit:
Any question of the demise, or even decline, of WP due to the inexplicably clumsy imposition of the block editor has been resoundingly answered with a thunderous “nope”. WP continues to thrive. In fact, WP just passed a huge milestone – it now powers over one-third of the web! From about 13% in January 2011, WP use has grown steadily to 33.4% to start 2019. Non-CMS share of the web has correspondingly plummeted, from over 75% in January 2011 to less than 50% today.
The trends appear intractable, so much so that I will make a foolishly reckless prediction – WP web share will surpass non-CMS before the end of calendar year 2019, U.S. Pacific time.
Back in January 2018, Cloudflare introduced a new service, Cloudflare Access. As is their generous habit for many of their features, CF even made it available on the free tier. CF describes Access as “a perimeter-less access control solution for cloud and on-premise applications”. Basically, Access lets me host internal applications on the Internet, where use is controlled, authorized, authenticated, and encrypted. For the end user, it works very similar to two-factor authentication. But it all happens on Cloudflare’s servers.
Cloudflare Apps are a lot like WordPress plugins. Each App adds specific functionality to my website. Like plugins, Apps are available in multiple categories such as SEO, Security, Social & Communication, etc. Another similarity – some Apps are free, some are not.
Once in a while I get lucky and someone will ‘like’ or ‘share’ my site on Facebook. By default, the FB post can look crappy, unlikely to drive much if any traffic my way. FB makes guesses about the title and description, and crops an image from my post or page to fit the space allocated on the post – not exactly the best Facebook post optimization.
A crappy-looking Facebook post
Cloudflare, even more so than other tech giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, has the capability to fight subjective hatred and injustice. That is, to limit free speech in accordance with the highly subjective viewpoints of its executives. A huge amount of web traffic flows through CF. It would be trivial to silence any voices that proliferate truly despicable hate speech and/or offend the easily-offended sensibilities of the cry-baby left.
To Cloudflare’s great credit – unlike other, mostly ultra-left web corporations – they have proven remarkably reluctant to do so.
