So I noticed a massive flaw in my brilliant plan to use CloudFlare to help leverage traffic on one of my projects. The theme keeps track of views by use of PHP code, because I often get direct hits from Google that doesn’t go via my front page or search features. This seemed like a brilliant idea, and worked like a charm, views were counted and tracked accordingly. Then I decided to improve performance for my end users by serving it through CloudFlare. At the time of this writing, CloudFlare had served 30,000 pages for me, which is brilliant, it reduced loads massively, and page loads were faster than ever. Then I noticed that my views weren’t going up, the tracker was completely dead. It took me a couple of minutes to realize why, because my Google Analytics was still running just fine. Of course! Google Analytics is JavaScript, it’s present even when serving a static site form CloudFlare’s own cache system to my users, where as my track code was server side, it required the user to actually hit the page for it to trigger. I do see the value of Cloud Flare, they mitigated a DDoS from me not long ago and I didn’t even notice it happened until I looked at my statistics this morning. And once I find a way to keep track of what i need to for my sites functionality without the use of my server side code, I will be re-implementing their use in a heartbeat because their service is absolutely brilliant! But for now, alas, I am routing all my traffic past Cloud Flare so that my sites features won’t take a hit as I plan my next move.]]>