If you own a website, you know about the fears that keep you up at night: getting hacked, receiving an overload of traffic slowing down your site and your site going down. Most small website owners have not had the resources – both technical and monetary – to do much about fixing these common problems, until now.

CloudFlare is a service which sets just about any website up on a Content Delivery Network, more commonly referred to as a CDN. Even more than that, it acts as a ‘firewall in the cloud‘ to prevent malicious spam and hack attacks from even getting to your website. On top of this, their entry level service is free!

The free plan protects your site by working to block known malicious IP addresses from your website via the Project Honeypot service. Project Honeypot maintains a list of known IPs who have been caught spamming or attempting attacks either because they are actually malicious attackers or because their machine has a trojan installed on it.

For questionable sources it will present a CAPTCHA to prove that the visitor is a real human and not a spam bot. The upgraded plans which include better statistics and more advanced protection from cross site scripting and SQL injection attacks among others.

How To Set Up Your Website With CloudFlare

It takes minimal technical knowledge to get started with CloudFlare. The most important thing you need to have access to is your Domain Registrar’s Nameserver Settings. This can be reached from your domain’s control panel on most domain registration providers and the process differs for each registrar. If you do not know how to do this, check with support at your domain registrar or do a quick google on “How to change name server“.

Sign Up

Cloudflare is now in open beta and you can sign up here. After your initial username and password creation you then proceed to set up your site. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to set up a hobby forum/image gallery site where I have had some problems with spamming in the past.

Set Up DNS

Once you enter your domain in the ‘add site’ box, CloudFlare analyzes your DNS records for their current values. It checks commonly used ones – if you have any custom records set up, it is good to double check them before migrating over to the service since CloudFlare effectively takes over your DNS hosting as well. You can add the custom settings on the next page. They will automatically add a ‘direct’ which will allow you to bypass the CloudFlare network and access your website directly should you need to for testing or other purposes.

After confirming your settings, CloudFlare will assign two new nameservers for your website. Proceed to your domain registrar and update your name servers to the ones provided. Once you save them it will take some time for the settings to migrate out to the internet. This could take anywhere from instantly to 24 hours to fully propagate. CloudFlare will also email your old and new name server settings for your record.

Sit Back and Relax

That is it! Your domain will now be protected & sped up by CloudFlare’s services. If you are interested in more of the technical aspects of how CloudFlare works to speed up and secure your website, their CEO Matthew Prince has a great writeup on how CloudFlare works over at Quora.

After roughly 24 hours, you will be able to get all kinds of interesting stats about your website.

Simple & Secure

As you can see, the CloudFlare service makes it easy for ‘every’ website owner to add professional grade security and content delivery optimizations to their website. The service recently won the ‘Most Disruptive Company‘ at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and is on track to becoming a big player in the web hosting field. If security is a huge concern for your website, I would definitely consider upgrading to the pro account – but for most website owners the free account is enough to offer basic protection and speed increases.

Another feature is that if your website goes down, CloudFlare will serve the last cached version of your page and files. This is useful if your webhost provider goes down a lot or if you are hosting it on an unsteady connection (like your home). Since CloudFlare serves most of the static content, it also saves on the bandwidth used by your site.

If there is one concern I have about that service, it is that is you are adding another layer of complexity onto the web hosting stack. If your site goes down, it gives another potential location where there could be a problem. I haven’t seen this happen yet, but from my experience in the web hosting field usually the simpler the setup the better. However in this case the security and speedup you receive from the service far outweigh any negatives.

Give CloudFlare a try today and let us know how it goes. I have set it up personally on 3 sites and have seen some decent speed increases on them. CloudFlare quotes an average of a 30% speed increase on websites on its network. This unique service is a great offering for website owners all over the world.

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I have fond memories of the old days of dial-up AOL (and no, not just because they’ve acquired us now). I remember thinking how stalkerishly awesome it was that I could see if another AOL user had read the email I had sent them, if they hadn’t replied yet. Then the Internet had to come along and ruin everything. But wait, a nifty startup just popped onto my radar which brings that functionality to Gmail.

EmailOracle is going to seem like a nightmare to some people at first glance. But it’s actually really cool — and smart. The service, which is a browser plug-in, augments Gmail to make it easy to track any message you send, get analytics on it, and send yourself reminders about the email if you don’t hear back in a set number of days.

How does this work? It’s simple really. EmailOracle inserts an image into each email you send. When that email is opened by the recipient, a call is made to EmailOracle’s servers to get that image. And this lets them know the email has been opened. They then send that information to you by way of a dashboard that is built into Gmail thanks to the plug-in (or on their site).

It’s a nice little trick that MailChimp and other mail-tracking services use as well. But MailChimp and the rest are mainly geared towards email marketing. EmailOracle is going right after individual users.

The service includes a base, free layer which allows you to track up to 20 emails a month. People who wish to track more can sign up for the Basic, Deluxe, or Pro accounts which cost $9.95, $19.95, and $99.95 a month, respectively. Each tier gives you access to a higher number of tracks per month (Pro goes all the way to 10,000), but Deluxe and Pro services also allow you to have customized signatures. This means you could do a 1 by 1 pixel image for the tracking — meaning it would be basically invisible to recipients.

That last bit may be a little unnerving to some. After all, I think we all lie from time to time about not having read an email when we actually have. But EmailOracle does allow for opting-out of this tracking if you click on the image in the email you receive. But again, if that’s a 1 by 1 pixel image, you’re probably not going to see it.

In terms of installing the plugin and giving EmailOracle access to your Gmail account, the company has this to say:

We take privacy and security seriously. We never store anyone’s emails on our servers, only the minimum information needed to provide email metrics (only information found in the email header, only for those emails on which the user requests metrics). We also use Gmail’s OAuth feature so that we never store any passwords, and we use SSL encryption so that no one can eavesdrop on the user’s tracked emails as we display them to him or her.

Aside from the tracking ability, the reminder notifications are very useful too. Overall, this seems like a very useful add-on for Gmail. And maybe the best one ever depending on how creepy you are.

The EmailOracle team was nice enough to offer 500 TechCrunch readers 200 additional tracks a month for free if you sign up with the code TECHCRUNCH1010.

Your “I didn’t open your email yet” excuse just went extinct.

If you have a website or a blog and you’re constantly struggling for new topics to write about, or you’re just getting bored and looking for something new, then it’s time to start automating some of your posts.

Depending on what topic your blog covers, there is a lot of potential when it comes to autoblogging. When I refer to autoblogging, I don’t mean just adding external RSS feeds to your blog. I’m talking about cool stuff – like having your mobile phone automatically update your blog periodically with your GPS coordinates, or having your computer automatically update your blog with the most recent 24 hours of your computer activity. Or how about having a webcam snapshots automatically posting to your blog whenever something new happens?

It’s that last autoblogging feature that I’d like to describe how you can accomplish in this article. To accomplish the task, you’re going to make use of two applications that I’ve reviewed before here at MakeUseOf.

The first is the Active Webcam app that I used in developing a home security system. The second is the Wordpress Postie plugin that lets you send email posts to your blog. By tying the two together, you’re going to build your own automatic webcam blogging system.

Setting Up Active Webcam

The first step of getting your webcam snapshots to post on your blog automatically is to download and install Active Webcam. The software will need to be installed on any computers that are connected to the webcam, unless you’re using a network IP webcam where it’s shared out to the whole network. Once you open Active Webcam, just click File -> New Camera, and select the type of webcam you want to set up.

For this example, I’m using a public webcam that’s streaming from a California engineering school. You could easily incorporate public webcams into your automatic blog updates if you like – be creative and use content from wherever you can find it, whether it’s your own webcam or streams from public ones.

Here’s the active webcam. You can add as many as you like and name them however you want them to show up in your blog entries. Once you’re done adding webcams, you’re ready to configure the software to issue blog entries by sending out email updates. You do this by configuring the Motion Detection area in Settings -> Motion Detection.

You aren’t actually going to use motion detection, you’re going to configure the schedule to capture camera updates at regular intervals. But first, click on “Send Email” and then click the “Email Settings” button. This is where you will actually create the post entry that will get sent to your blog.

There are a few important things to note here. Whatever email address you choose to use as the “sender”, make note of it because you’ll need it later. For “Recipient” make sure that it’s a unique email address that you aren’t using for anything else except this. If you need to, create a new, free email account. Set up the SMTP server settings with your correct settings.

The “Subject” that you type in will be the title of your post and the “Message” will be your blog entry. There are certain variables you can insert, like {Camera} for the camera number, or the current date and time. This is nice because it lets you create a dynamic blog entry. Also, make sure your blog entry starts with “:start” and ends with “:end”. This will ensure that the Postie plugin posts the entry correctly.

Finally, go into Tools -> Scheduler, and click “Enable Scheduler.”  You can set up the software to “check in” to the webcam at certain times, and if there’s any motion, it’ll go ahead and send the email that you’ve configured. Your automated blogging webcam is now set up!

Set Up Postie to Publish the Webcam Blog Update

The final step is to configure the Postie plugin to accept your webcam’s blog entry and publish it. Once you download the Postie Wordpress plugin, follow the instructions in the Postie article to set it up for posting to the blog.

It’s pretty straightforward, but the important part is that the “sender” email you configured in Active Webcam needs to be an approved sender in your Postie settings. Additionally, the Recipient should be the Postie email address.

Here is the Postie plugin processing an incoming post from one of the webcam updates.

And here is what the automated webcam blog update looks like after getting published to the blog.

You can play around a little bit with the variables. This is an awesome way to update your readers with real-time information from any location in the world. Show them haunted locations, famous landmarks – any public webcam that you discover, or any that you set up, you can use to post status updates with image snapshots to your blog – and you don’t have a lift a single finger to do it.

Can you think of any cool uses for your own webcam-powered blog entries? Share your creativity in the comments section below.

Image credit: Quentin Houyoux

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Anyone that knows me well knows that I love RSS feeds. RSS is one of the driving forces behind the connectivity of the web. It is the fastest and easiest way to get your information into the online world. Aibek previously covered 14 cool ways you can make use of RSS feeds, and these really show how versatile and useful RSS can be.

Recently, I stumbled across an impressive new service called xFruits. xFruits has a series of tools called “bricks” which serve a specific information-conversion service. For example, in one case you can convert an RSS feed into a website, and in another you can use data from a feed to create a PDF file. xFruits was briefly mentioned in the directory, but there are so many amazing uses for these online tools that a full review is in order.

Let RSS Information Feed Everything Else

When you first sign up for your free xFruits account, you’ll discover a toolbox of 11 awesome tools that you can use to either distribute your own content throughout the Internet, or organize other peoples’ content into a format that you like the most.

The combinations and possibilities are exciting. Organizing and converting information streams from throughout the web into a format that you prefer is a really useful feature, but I’d also like to show you how xFruits can help you to syndicate your own websites and blogs across the web.

Turning Your RSS Feed Into a Multi-Format Syndication Tool

Your RSS feed is a stream of your latest titles, linked back to your site, and with a synopsis of the content.  There are people out there that really have no interest in reading blogs, but they may prefer e-books or mobile sites.

One of the simplest ways you can share your content with people is with a simple HTML site that highlights your latest content – sort of a web-based feed reader that displays your feed. You can set this up using xFruits’ very simple RSS to HTML tool.

Once you click “Publish” – the feed gets published to a URL on your public xFruit profile which displays all of the latest titles from your feed in the left navigation bar, and the content in the main panel. The site is extremely simple, but it’s also very efficient.

xFruit also has a whole assortment of buttons when you click on “Add To” that lets you send your new data feed to various other syndication websites. For example your new simple website can go to Technorati, BlinkIt or MyYahoo.

Probably the most impressive tool on xFruits is the Aggregator to RSS. This tool seems simple, but it’s actually rather powerful when used in combination with the other tools. You can list a combination of RSS feeds and it will aggregate them into one, powerful RSS feed that you can use in a number of other xFruits tools.

Previously I reviewed WINKSite, a free service that will create a customized mobile website based off of your RSS feed. However, if you aren’t particular about the formatting or appearance of your mobile site, the xFruit RSS-to-Mobile tool gives you a mobile site in just one click. Here is the mobile website for one of my blogs.

Of course, I think my favorite tool out of the entire xFruits toolset is the Post-to-RSS tool. Using this tool, you can enable as many email addresses as you like to post directly to an RSS feed. A whole team of mobile bloggers could post – all they have to do is send in the post to your unique Post-to-RSS email address (provided inside the tool).

Each incoming email immediately updates the RSS feed with the title (email subject) and the content (email).

This is one of the coolest ways to set up a fast and easy mobile blog to either collaborate real-time with several people, or as a mobile blog that people can follow with any RSS reader.

Another awesome tool if you have visitors that may prefer to read your latest updates in PDF format, is the RSS-to-PDF tool. You can even feature a “PDF” button on your site that let your visitors download the PDF file of your latest updates.

I’ve saved the best for last. Most of the available online tools that “post” RSS updates only insert embedded Javascript somewhere on your page that displays the latest RSS titles. The Feed updates are not issued as actual posts to your blog.

Amazingly, this little site called xFruits has succeeded where so many others have failed. By filling out a simple form that includes the path to your xmlrpc.php file (make sure posting via xml is enabled on your blog!), you can instantly convert an RSS feed into actual blog posts on your blog.

You could use this feature to stream in content from free article directories or syndicate your friend’s sites with auto-updates that link back to their site. The possibilities are limitless.

Browse through some of the useful tools at xFruits, test a few of them out and let us know what you think of the service in the comments section below.

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