Putting this site behind Cloudflare has been on the agenda for about a week now. Yesterday, I decided to get it done. But to my surprise, it would not work no matter what I tried. Today I decided to give it another go around.
After sifting through a mountain of server logs, I was finally able to pin down the issue.
I also discovered that the images on the homepage had been broken almost all day due to a change I made in variables earlier. I integrated some site settings into the admin panel, and while implementing them, I forgot to change one of the image URLs on the homepage.
My cache was tricking me, as I hadn't noticed. But we are back up and running.
Now that I have implemented most of the blog features, I plan to move the blog to the homepage and the images to another page. Well, actually, the homepage will host blog posts along with some AI images.
I will probably have a setting only to post specific blog posts to the homepage. One's that have some entertainment value, unlike this one, where I'm just talking about the website. I'll also put the most popular AI images in there somewhere so you can get a good mix of content.
I may wait a week or so to make that move whenever the mood hits me.
I have a default image that posts to the top of these pages whenever I don't upload one myself. I did that so that I could make posts on my phone and not have to worry about optimizing an image for the site. I create a thumbnail with uploads, but that's all the optimization I plan to do. I much prefer optimizing the image on my computer before even uploading it.
I may make a few default images that I can choose from when creating new posts. I don't know why I'm telling you that, but it's on my mind now.
This site was fast before, but damn, it got much quicker with Cloudflare. There are a few reasons that I wanted to put the site behind the service:
I had WordPress installed on this domain for about six months. Bots are constantly trying to hack into the old WordPress files that no longer exist. Cloudflare stops most of these attacks and keeps the site from getting bogged down.
I spent most of my day working on the admin panel, cleaning up code, and working on the UI. I have to say it looks sexy. I also added a page to Wisedocks.com, and seriously I can't wait to migrate this software over there. It's much more enjoyable to write blog posts here.
This site is so lightweight it's wild. It loads faster, and if I don't like something, it's much easier to change it. I've made a loose rule: I don't want to use libraries or frameworks to build the site. I'm not even using jQuery. If you know, you know. I may start using jQuery in the future. But right now, plain javascript is working just fine.
I still have a few more days of tidying up in the admin panel and several more features to add, which will probably introduce some new bugs. But I'm very close to a functional website. I didn't expect to be this far along in just a few weeks.
Although there is still quite a bit to do in getting the front end, you see up to par. It is hideous at the moment. It's on the list.
