Back in my youth, I was accused on more than one occasion of “having my head in the clouds.” I suppose there were worse places to have my head.
Of course “in the cloud” (singular) has a much different meaning today. Simply put, it means keeping your data on virtual servers on the Internet instead of on your own machine in the home or office. This blog post is a good example of that. It may be on a hardware server at my Webhost, or maybe not. Maybe the Webhost stores it in the cloud.
Well, there is one way for sure to make use of the cloud in my blogging, and I have done so. That is to employ a service called Cloudflare. It’s used by millions of websites to improve speed and security, reduce spam, and cut down on bandwidth usage. It’s a free service. My Host Provider was happy to help me set it up.
It may seem like overkill to feature such a sophisticated service on a tiny blog that’s non-commercial and for family/friends. But I get my fair share of spam disguised as commentary. Anything that reduces the number of Black Hats is welcome.
Some people don’t like Cloudflare, especially if they use a web browser called Tor. This browser is designed for Internet anonymity – a good thing that Cloudflare actually supports. Unfortunately, a lot of spammers and intruders use the Tor network, and it’s hard to separate them from the legitimate users. Cloudflare doesn’t block Tor users but sometimes it makes them go through an additional security check (I am not a robot) before allowing access to a website. I am not too concerned about this issue since very few visitors to this site will be using Tor.
I was informed that it will take a couple of days before the Cloudflare install really becomes effective. We’ll see if I end up with my head in the clouds once more.