One last trick, hectic, face to face with the dead

So I decided to try one more trick to get the Bar-barians web site to play nice with my shared hosting, setting up a CloudFlare account. CloudFare is web site accelerator but the way it does it is interesting.  It uses some of the same caching tricks as other WordPress accelerators however the big difference is how it cleans the traffic coming to your site.

To implement Cloudflare you actually have to change your domain name servers to point to Cloudflare DNS servers.  As a result all traffic is inspected by their service which has the ability to filter out the bullshit traffic that can hammer a WordPress based website.  Spam bots, web crawlers and most other non-human being traffic is picked off and never even touches your actual web site.  This has the potential to dramatically reduce the load on your site.

W3 Total Cache has built in support for CloudFlare so it was very easy to implement.  Really the only thing that made me nervous was pointing the DNS for the domain somewhere else but it seems to work just fine and is simple to reverse if need be.  I am using their free tier of service.

Of course I have no way to know how much impact this change has until I get a new report from IX since I can’t get it myself.  If this last ditch effort fails I plan to move the site to wpengine.com, one of the best places to host a WordPress site.  Yea it costs some money, but it appears to be money well spent based on the reviews I see about them.

I had a couple hours at home last night that felt pretty hectic.  I was compiling video, trying to fix a problem with my home server, doing laundry, making dinner and trying to set up a new Xbox 360 I got from Tim.  I was rotating between the various tasks trying to multitask the best I could.  Finally I got things under control.

As I was setting the new 360 up I wound up stumbling across the Walking Dead game on Xbox Live.  I fired it up, curious if it was any good.  Wow, it isn’t good, it’s f’ing great.

The game literally makes you feel like you are in the middle of a Walking Dead episode.  It is a pretty perfect combo of cinematic, action and exploring.  When you dialogue with various characters you have a choice of various responses.  The choices you make change the way the game plays out.

There are intense, scary moments where you need to perform certain actions in order to save your own ass.  I could feel my heart rate rocketing as I had to kick a zombie off me repeatedly before I grabbed a hammer to smash its head in.

As I was playing it I was wondering how in the world could I be playing this awesome game for free?  Well as I looked at the options screen I saw how.  They break the game into chapters, they give you chapter one for free, to hook you in.  If you want to continue subsequent chapters they will start sucking Xbox credits out of your account.  They might grab a few of my credits, it really is an immersive game, especially when played with the lights low, surround sound on and a 73 inch TV to put the action in your face.