My 3 Year Old Just Sent His First Tweet (Do You Think He Has Taste?)

First let me say, one of the best ways to get authority links is to help people, or be the first to notify people about a possible problem. Thus a big thanks to James at Online IT Guide for sending me an email to let me know of a potential hack of my Twitter account. Here is the evidence That is frightening… the chance that I was hacked as well. The Trail Of Evidence My son was in the other room My wife's laptop is open with a Youtube video playing Big Green Tractor The tweet was sent via one of the new tweet buttons and has @youtube – not a guarantee my account hasn't been hacked, but a fair chance some legitimate "interaction" has taken place. He normally uses Chrome not Firefox – it is possible I have logged in to Twitter on my wife's laptop and saved the cookie On the laptop he is not logged in to Youtube as me – he has his own Youtube account with a playlist of songs he likes (other than the ones that have now been moved to Vevo which we can't access) Verdict:- A 3 Year Old Tweeted A Miley Cyrus Video To 10,000 Marketing Geeks I still can't work out how a 3 year old can:- Click a Share button below a video Then click a specific Twitter button to actually tweet Then somehow "send" the tweet It is possible he found a link somewhere on Youtube that was formatted to Tweet the video, or even an advert.. he clicks those all the time – I sometimes feel guilty but he is a consumer, a future buyer and "get'em early" – he has good taste in cars. Maybe hot keys? Anyway… no I am not back on Twitter and it seems my son likes older women. Youtube & Twitter both have an interface even a 3 year old can use. Tags: twitter, twitter hacked, youtube, youtube hacked Related posts You Have The Attention Span of a Gnat (6) You Can't Charge For Twitter Popularity (10) WOOT Creating Twitter Splogs (1) Why Tweetmeme Sucks For Marketers (72) Why Tweetglide Matters – seriously (72) Which Technorati Top Keyword Gets You Splogged The Most? (part1) (7) TwitThis Causes Pages To Load Slowly – Here is a fix (1) TwitterAdder – Software Specification (10) Twitter's 2M+ Indexed Search Results Pages (6) Twitter | Google Toolbar Button (3)

Cloudflare – Potentially Mindblowing e-Commerce CDN Solution Posted: 30 Sep 2010 07:35 AM PDT I first heard about Cloudflare when they presented at Techcrunch Disrupt. I am not writing about every startup that presented there, just a couple that caught my eye as something that I think will have a significant impact for my readers. Cloudflare is a distributed DNS, website security, & distributed Nginx powered reverse proxy (for static content) & caching proxy with content delivery network with some additional tracking and reporting ability. That is a whole load of technology but what this means to you is:- On average, a website on CloudFlare … … loads 30% faster … uses 60% less bandwidth … has 65% fewer requests … is way more secure All for free! This is how your website is normally exposed on the web. You are in direct line of fire for everything that can possibly be thrown at it. With Cloudshare you have an intelligent doorman in the way, only allowing through certain requests. Some high volume menial tasks such as answering the door to the postman and deliveries of groceries get handled by the caching proxy/cdn – unlike a normal CDN the URL for any file doesn't have to change so it is very much like you set up a reverse proxy with Nginx or Squid yourself and assigned the traffic to a media server. Simple Setup The basic setup is fairly straight forward and only requires changing your nameservers. It is only as complicated as your initial setup, so if you have a little bit more going on… Google Apps, domain keys etc, though it looks more complicated those actually get bypassed. There are also some extended settings I haven't explored these too much, but there are some things to be careful about with a blog. As an example some services such as feed readers often pull images directly and thus might be blocked by any hot linking prevention. There are some interesting options for identifying geolocation and content obfuscation from certain types of visitors, though that doesn't mean they are designed for cloaking content from search engines. This is also where you assign security level with the recommendation being to use high security. You could look on the security as being a little similar to Bad Behavior, though with a CAPTCHA. I wonder if they have thought of monetizing the CAPTCHAs? Security The threat control is pretty interesting in that it can block web spammers, botnet zombies and exploit attackers of various types, and that is just with the free version. The team has a lot of pedigree in this area as they were behind Project Honeypot. With the CAPTCHA and I believe also a message facility, there is also a very effective safety net in case of false positives which do happen, though some bots won't fill in CAPTCHAs is caught by mistake such as Googlebot. I noticed today some discussion about Google's sitemap crawler being blocked, and some suggestion of lower crawl by Google resulting from this. In many ways Cloudflare could be looked on as an extension or next generation Project Honeypot, with the additional bribe of actually providing active protection and a huge bribe by caching content. Analytics The analytics features look quite interesting as an aggregate view. They mention why the numbers might seem so much higher than javascript stats though don't mention browsers pre-fetching content which is fairly standard these days. Cloudflare seem to (or claim to) have knocked a second off my load time, though from what I have read that is based on the load time of the home page from another server in various locations. Overall performance and relative performance will depend on what other optimization you are using. I am currently using:- W3 Total Cache Enhanced static page cache to disk W3 Total Cache Database Cache using APC W3 Total Cache Object Cache using APC Autoptimize for combining/minification of CSS/jscript Header & Footer – I discovered this gets added after Autoptimize has done it's thing, so useful for adding things that I don't necessarily want cached such as tracking stuff I am testing. Cloudflare effectively as my only CDN (though I have a Amazon Cloudfront/S3 and a few other alternatives) I could possibly improve performance a bit by locally caching lots of javascript, combining/minifying and then having it loaded from the CDN, but there is a lot of bug checking. I don't use APC for page caching as I found, at least on my Liquid Web Storm On Demand server that that was a lot slower for time to first byte. Advanced Setup You will initially hit problems with IP referrals and your server logs – the ideal solution is to to install "mod_cloudflare" on your server. There is also this alternative (one of 2) for dealing with just the referrer within WordPress, but this won't fix your server logs. You would add this to wp-config.php if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ) { $X_FORWARDED_FOR=explode(",", $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']); $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=trim($X_FORWARDED_FOR[0]); //take the first element in the array } Security For Premium Content This isn't a secure solution for paid membership sites – you might be better using a real CDN which can either domain lock or generate one time links. I haven't actually tried it with video yet. Mindblowing for e-Commerce If you are using an e-Commerce platform such as Volusion or BigCommerce which charges you a fortune for bandwidth, but you have control of your Nameservers and DNS this is the most amazing product / solution you will ever find. Ideally you would go for the pro version with better security and performance which for most e-Commerce stores would likely be just $20/month. The savings for many store owners would be $80+ per month. Then without messing around with remote hosted image hosting you can have CDN performance and a massive reduction in bandwidth excess fees. This isn't the only reason people face extra fees on services such as Volusion and BigCommerce, but it is a major one, and the extra performance and killing the bots makes it a best in class solution. For further reading I came across this great post comparing the performance of various technology blogs earlier while doing some testing. TechCrunch: The slowest tech blog, or one of the fastest? Turns out, it's both. p.s. I get to use Cloudflare for free, but everyone can – no barter deals for links & currently they don't have an affiliate program. Tags: BigCommerce, CDN, Cloudflare, content delivery network, e-commerce, ecommerce, Project Honeypot, volusion, wordpress plugins