I visited their site, purely out of curiosity and was instantly intrigued by the awesome video that they have on the site. The extremely friendly and VERY well thought out UI made me want to sign up within a couple minutes of hearing about their service for the first time. So 11/10 on this point.

The process is extremely simple, well commented and very well thought out. You will be done in minutes and you will see the benefits roll in instantly. So perfect points all around again.

This is where I run into issues. My usual hosting (pac web hosting) is epic, when it comes to speed. I get 20 ms ping from my home and sub 10 ms from work, when the name servers run directly. After the switch-over to CloudFlare, I started getting ping in the range of 260ms – 300ms, they were unstable and over ten times my normal ping.

Page load times also increased dramatically. Normally this site loads in about 0.7 seconds (safari 4, mac os), after the switch, it jumped to 3-4 seconds, again unstable and much slower. I thought maybe its the London internet being slow in the afternoon, leave it, check it later when I’m at home. The story is worse, the site takes about 15 seconds to load the page. This made me freak out and I switched the nameservers back to pac.

Half an hour later, I’m back  on pac directly, the speed is back to it’s old standard.

Now I’m not trying to badmouth this FANTASTIC service, I love the idea, I admire the execution and I will come back to it again in a few months to see what’s new.

I’m not sure where the extreme slowdown came from (maybe things weren’t set up fully yet)? Maybe I just got put on a laggy server? No idea, but it sure made me freak out and bail on it straight away.

It’s a shame, I hope that my next test of this awesome service will produce different results and I will get to love it as so many do.

I heard about a service called CloudFlare from a post linked from reddit and was instantly intrigued.

They claim to increase the loading times and to bounce bad traffic, these 2 reasons alone made me want to try it out.

So I signed up for the free option, pointed my nameservers to them and am waiting to see the results, will post back with results.

I’m trying to set up a clean url structure like:
site.com/category/sub-category/
Which is effortless in wordpress, however just doesn’t want to work in ee off the bat. I have to resort to mysql queries and logical bits of code like the one below just don’t work.

category="{if "{segment_2}"}{segment_2}{if:else}{segment_1}{/if}"

I miss wordpress.

So instead of using any other templates, I thought I might just create my design on top of the wordpress default, I’ve never done this, always used sandbox, so modding the wordpress default theme will be fun.

I’ll start by inserting 960.gs (if you’ve used it, you wouldn’t ask why.) and then will strip the css of the default theme and will start injecting my styles, going to go for something simple, clean white background, we’ll see where this ends up.