Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

CloudFlare Experiment Ends Weirdly

I ended up turning it all off for one reason only.

I keep getting a 522 error on cloudflare.com.

Now. I have a working theory that it happens when I’m hitting my own site a lot (be it for development or as recently, a lot of traffic I need to reply to), but what would happen is I got an error 522 on my sites. So I’d go to cloudflare.com to whitelist my IP, since their explanation of “This means your site is down” was wrong (site was up, I was ssh’d in at the time), and I’d get a 522 on cloudflare.com.

Let me roll back to August 1st.

That night I went to make some changes on my site to the CSS and, instead of turning on Dev Mode in CloudFlare, I did my thing with Git, pushed my changes, dumped the cache of that CSS file, and was prepared to smile at my glory. Nope! I got a 522. This was odd, since I was currently on the server via SSH and the load on the box was 0.3. Naturally I went to support.cloudflare.com to try and see if I’d missed some directions only to get a 522 there as well.

Track that for a second. I got a 522 on CloudFlare’s domain.

The possible answers I could come up with, since I couldn’t read any of their documentation, as either my IP was blocked or the cache server I was proxying through was down. Since I could log into the dashboard for my accounts, I went in and tried to guess how to whitelist my IP. I couldn’t find that, so I opened a support request:

I can’t access support.cloudflare.com because of 522s. My IP is 172.249.156.169 – Is there any way I can get whitelisted?

I got reply that it was the wrong place to ask, which I don’t think was correct. One of the solutions (per a Google cache of the support page I couldn’t access, hello) said that you could whitelist your IP to see if that helped. Cool. Except I couldn’t get the part of the page to load that told me where and how that was set.

So I asked for support with the dashboard via the dashboard support panel. Instead I got someone telling me I had to open a new ticket. And he was incapable of transferring my ticket or saying “Hey, you can’t access the right support place, let me make a ticket for you! Sorry about that.” It was akin to telling me to email them to tell them my email was down.

I fumed. And then I kept clicking until I found the place to enter my IP. I did and magically CloudFlare started working for me! I quickly went and opened a ticket to complain that I couldn’t have a ticket transferred (or made for me), and suggested this:

If someone’s logged in via the dashboard and they’re getting a 522 on ALL Cloudflare sites, it’s a logical assumption that something blocked them. But if I can log in, the odds are I’m really me, so that should get an auto-whitelist. If that isn’t possible, can it be detected and alerted? “Hey, we noticed your IP is blocked. Would you like to white list it, since you’ve logged in we can be reasonably sure you’re not an asshat?”

They replied with a standard ‘A 522 means…’ and told me to whitelist their servers on my server firewall. For some reason the email didn’t get to me, so I made a new ticket.

In this ticket, I had to wait until I got another 522 (end of August) and when I sent in my error ID and a screenshot, I was told this:

This was a timeout between our cache server and the origin server that hosts support.cloudflare.com.

I think he actually meant “Our cache server was down.” because at that time I couldn’t get to any CF hosted site until I rebooted my router and got a new IP.

I don’t really buy this, though, and I think their IP block is too aggressive. I would run into it all the time when I was at a hotel. I’d be reading comments on my own sites and get blocked. And every single time I got blocked, it was from all of my domains and cloudflare.com. Sketchy as hell to me.

When I added in the problem that ‘always up’ actually meant if your site was down they’d put up a CloudFlare page to apologize for the site being down, I decided to turn it off. It clearly wasn’t helping me as much as I’d hoped.

This isn’t to say CloudFlare is terrible and you should never use it, just that it proved to be too frustrating for me to want to use.

14 September, 2015
On Site Advertising: Affiliates
This is related to a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

So what about those affiliates?

Affiliates are simply links to other sites that earn you money because, after clicking on your link, they buy something. And in my experience, they are never going to be the big money earners.

I’ve used the following, in no particular order:
- Amazon
- StudioPress.com (themes)
- Easy Digital Downloads (ecommerce solution)
- Sucuri (site security)
- Liquidweb (web hosting)
- Namecheap (domains)
- Utility Pro (theme)
All those links are affiliate links, by the way.

Unless I’m making a post that has a direct link to them, like I’m discussing them specifically, they don’t get a lot of traffic. The problem is, like ads, where do you put affiliate links for the best traction?

In a weird way, links like those are why spammers spam links. They trust people will click on the random links and buy a product. If you turn your affiliate links into banner ads, then you can be more successful, but now you just have more and more cluttering up your site.

This is pretty much why I suck at them, though. I don’t enjoy marketing. I hate the push of sales. The way I buy things is I look around, I ask around, and I test. I know what features I want and, if I don’t, I actually do ask people for help understanding them.

I’ve read multiple essays on how to effectively be an affiliate, and the advice boils down to what CopyBlogger says about being honest and authentic.

But I do reviews rarely, which means affiliate links are just these links that sit around and look link ‘powered by’ links, which they really are. I will say that I don’t have an affiliate link for anything I don’t use.
7 September, 2015
On Site Advertising: WordAds
This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

My experience with WordAds has been a little spotty. In terms of revenue, it’s far superior to ProjectWonderful. That said ProjectWonderful (and Google Adsense) have some aspects that make WordAds less than attractive.

I used WordAds for about 13 months, and while I loved the plugin they made, and I loved the support, the problems I have are with the system and the quality of ads. I want to stress that this is a ‘review’ of their beta product. I knew what I was getting into with a beta, but there were issues with the system that went beyond what I’d normally accept for a beta.

A beta is expected to be functional and usable if buggy. WordAds was functional, but I had no control and no information, which made it unusable.

I had no control over ad placement, which normally I would say is the ‘fault’ of the plugin, but in reality it’s clearly the decision of the service. It provides two ads: one below the first post on an archive page and one below the post content itself on a single post. The ads are exactly the same shape. Most of the time this is fine. On some of my sites, which use ‘non traditional’ layouts, it made them very, very janky.

Additionally I have no control over what ads show. The default ads tended to lean towards ClickBait. I don’t like that, but it’s pretty minor since default ads always kinda suck no matter what system you use. Still, I couldn’t pick and close ads I found offensive. The winner for this service is Project Wonderful. For WordAds I had to right click, get the information of what had loaded, and send that in to get it blocked. Given that most users just say “Did you know you had a Rand Paul ad on your site?” this was impossible to manage for me.

When I combine this with the lack of information … Here’s the ultimate reason I called it quits. There’s no dashboard. There is no way for a user to see analytics. I had no way see what ads are doing well and where which means I could never evaluate the impact of them on my layout. Like many professionals, I review SEO impact and ad displays. I couldn’t do that at all on WordAds to the point that they had to email me a report of my earnings.

I was told the manual emailing of revenue was a temporary stop-gap while the new system was put in place. Six months later, not only was I still getting emails, but I actually didn’t get one for a month and had to politely ask someone on staff. They were, as always, totally awesome about it, but I felt the underlying current was they too were feeling the strain of a lack of automation. It felt like there was no managerial and resource investment in what should be a killer product.

Having earnings be a black box is a crappy user experience. Having analytics be a ‘just trust us…’ world is useless if I want to improve my site quality and revenue. I’m all for set-it-and-forget-it (which is ironically why I love the plugin), but the user experience for the service itself was disheartening.

Review
- Ease of Registration: 4/5
- Ease of use (on WordPress): 5/5
- Ease of use (non WordPress): 0/5
- Customizable: 0/5
- Control: 1/5
- Analytics: 0/5
- Revenue: 3/5
When they get out of beta, I may check them out again, but right now I don’t feel comfortable having my eggs in an invisible basket.
2 September, 2015
On Site Advertising: Google Adsense
This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

Google Adsense is the grand daddy of ad systems, and if you can use it, it’s got the highest rewards. In the last 3 years, they’ve streamlined and upgraded and made the system incredibly nice to work with.

I stopped using Adsense for the 3 years prior to this experience because I was frustrated with the lack of control. That’s far less the case today. You can now allow and block ads far more granularly than before. You can blacklist specific domains or specific types of ads. While it’s a little derpy to get the URLs, I was able to blacklist some anti-gay sites right away.

Even though I still wish they’d just blacklist those people from making money in the first place (not Rand Paul, the hate sites), Google’s doing a much better job than they used to, and I feel morally better about it.

Of course, while there are a bajillion WordPress plugins for it, there’s no official Google Plugin and because of that, I don’t use any plugin. The same code I wrote up for Project Wonderful is easily applied to how I want to use Google Adsense.

Also Adsense remains the highest earner of any revenue stream I’ve used. Their current system even includes a scorecard, updating regularly, that explains how your site is doing:

That ‘Site Health’ score being a 4 is due to WordPress putting ‘render blocking javascript‘ in the header. I’ll live. Everything else is fine.

The interesting thing about Adsense is that Google’s rolling out something new. Google Contributor. And if you have adsense then it’s already on:

I’m not entirely sure how it works, and I kind of want to see it be such that people can pick a site to sponsor, but the idea is a game changer I’m excited for. This alone was why I went back to Adsense.

Review:
- Ease of Registration: 4/5
- Ease of use (on WordPress): 3/5
- Ease of use (non WordPress): 3/5
- Customizable: 5/5
- Control: 3/5
- Analytics: 5/5
- Revenue: 4/5
Adsense is old, but it’s aged well and Google’s treating it with love. It makes money, they appreciate that, and it shows.
31 August, 2015
On Site Advertising: Project Wonderful
This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

I found Project Wonderful by accident. It was linked to on some comic book and fan sites I visit. For the most part, Project Wonderful is Project Pretty Good. It’s goofy, it’s silly, and most of the ads you get are for webcomics or ebooks.

Revenue from it is also chancy at best. I average pennies a day, but I have a lot of control and I like that which is part of why my revenue was so low. I set it up so I have to approve every single ad and ad change, which is exceptionally time consuming. This also causes lower revenue, but the primary reason I like it is that control.

I can block users, I can report them for scams or bait-and-switch, and I have a very wonderful rapport with the staff there. They’ve told me before that they appreciate my reports. If I change my mind about an ad, it’s a little tricky but I can go and find it and reject it after the fact.

There’s no plugin for this ad network. You have two bits of code to put on your site, the basic Project Wonderful JS that loads their commands and then the code for each ad-block. It’s pretty trivial to make a plugin for it, and in fact I made a shortcode that allows me to run [pwads id=name], where name is the name of the adbox. It’s a very basic switch check and sanitize and it works fine for me.

This code is also accessible outside of WordPress because the shortcode is calling a separate file (like /secret/ads/projectwonderful.php ) which I can then use with sneaky includes. But that’s another post. What must be known here is that I have it working in and out of WordPress with the same code base.

The biggest problem with Project Wonderful is that it feels like 1999. The site is old and dated. The interface is clunky and has a crappy UX if you’re on a tablet. Don’t bother with a phone.

The welcome page is pretty nice:

You have links to all your ads, you can click on them for more ads:

It’s not bad, it’s just dated. Also they have downtime a little more than I’d like to see. It used to be bad but now it’s once in a while. The real problem with the downtime is it makes my site slow.

Review
- Ease of Registration: 4/5
- Ease of use (on WordPress): 3/5
- Ease of use (non WordPress): 3/5
- Customizable: 5/5
- Control: 5/5
- Analytics: 3/5
- Modernity: 2/5
- Revenue: 1/5
I’m still using Project Wonderful, but the revenue certainly is something hard to accept. I stick with it, mostly, because it’s ethically pleasing.
26 August, 2015
On Site Advertising
I made a passing reference to having ethics when it came to advertising a few days ago, and scared a friend of mine. This was probably because I was using his ad network. I’m not anymore, but that has nothing to do with ethics.

The ethics comment stemmed from why the link to DreamHost on my site is not an affiliate link. Could it be? Probably, but I get free hosting by working here.

In the last decade, I’ve used three main sources for ad revenue on sites. Originally I used Google Adsense because, like everyone else, I used Google. At a certain point, I got upset because I couldn’t remove ads I didn’t like without having my revenue bottom out. I don’t like having ads for things I find to be distasteful on my site. This is actually a pretty big deal to me. I don’t like not being able to say “Rand Paul is evil, get him off my site.” At that point I moved to Project Wonderful, and then in the last year I was able to opt in to the Beta project for WordAds on self-hosted WordPress sites.

I’m going to ‘review’ all three on a scale of zero to five, where zero is ‘not at all’ and five is ‘the winner.’
- Ease of Registration: How easy it is to sign up and get added to the system?
- Ease of use (on WordPress): Getting it added to WordPress. Is there a plugin? Is
- Ease of use (non WordPress): What about outside of WordPress? Is this available for any CMS?
- Customizable: Can I decide what ads show when and where?
- Control: Can I reject specific ads and block certain advertisers?
- Analytics: What does the tracking look like? Can I see how my ads are performing?
- Modernity: How do the ads and the interface feel? Do they keep up with mobile and design trends?
- Revenue: How profitable is it?
Those are the items that are important to me, in no real order.

If you want to know what I’m using, it’s currently a mix of Project Wonderful and Google Adsense. This is not a full measure of the worth of any of these products. I’m using them in a non-WordPress only world, which colors things differently than one might think.

In additional to advertising networks, I’ve used a number of affiliate programs from StudioPress to Amazon, and had interesting results with those.

By no means is this an exhaustive set of reviews. It’s just my experiences with them.
24 August, 2015