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Setting up the Free CDN Cloudflare with your website

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So what is a CDN?..

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottlenecks near that server.

*copied right from Wikipedia

Advantages of CDN

Strategically placed edge servers decrease the load on interconnects, public peers, private peers and backbones, freeing up capacity and lowering delivery costs. It uses the same principle as above. Instead of loading all traffic on a backbone or peer link, a CDN can offload these by redirecting traffic to edge servers.

*again right from Wikipedia

Now where does Cloudflare come in…
CloudFlare is a service which sets just about any website up on its CDN and 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.
More so the entry level service is free…

Adding your website on Cloudflare

1. First signup for an account on Cloudflare

2. Use the ‘Add Website’ Dialog to add your domain name.

3. Cloudflare than scans for your DNS Setup, this may take a minute or 2 after which you can continue to the next step.

4. Cloudflare now shows the website’s current DNS setup. make sure all the data is right. It usually will be. Please do add any data missing and click next to continue.

*Please do not change anything here unless you are entirely sure

5. On the next page we do see the records table again, with the records that will be powered by cloudflare, you do not need to change anything here. but make sure that only your website is powered by cloudflare and not you mail and other records and click next.

6. Here cloudflare provides you with 2 of its own DNS records that you have to change with your domain name registrar.

7. Thats it you are done, it may take upto 24 hours for the changes to take effect after which your website will be powered with a CDN so no matter even if your webserver is down your website still shows up…

Creating a Professional Logo

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Final Product

Getting Started

To get started, lets start by creating a 640 x 480 document with 72 resolution and in RGB mode.  Next, create a blank layer. This will be the layer where our main text will go.

Step 1.

Once you have created that new layer, go to your type toolbar and put whatever text you would like. I used this websites name for the main text.

Step 2

Now, you can’t just have a bland logo and think it looks professional. You need to add a bit of color and effects to make it look perfect. Below are the effects and gradient that I used.

  • Drop Shadow
  • Inner Shadow
  • Gradient Overlay
Click to Enlarge

Step 3

Now we need to give our main text something below it. Usually the slogan/motto goes there but you can put basically anything you want. I went ahead and put the slogan for AdminForums on there (Webmaster Community).

I also thought it would look really nice if I put a line underneath the main text so that is is not so blank. This is totally optional but I choose to do it.

I also decreased the opacity down to 20% so that it gave it a light gray color. You could do it the other way and just find a good color for it but this was a bit easier at the time.

Step 4

From here, let your mind roam and create whatever you want to add-on to this basic but professional logo. I placed a black rectangle using the rectangle tool (m) and then lowered the fill to 0% and then added a 1px stroke to it to make it look nice. Remember, be creative! There is nothing stopping you from expressing your ideas.

That is all for the tutorial. Thanks for reading and I hoped you learned something! I will try writing more tutorials if I can but I am going to try to write at least one every month.

 

Top 5 Admin Forums of 2012

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Admin Forums are a great way to get the resources and help you need as a forum administrator, There is an abundance of forums out there offering
help and resources for people who own forums but not all of them are right for you, Below I will list the top 5 Admin Forums judging by the amount of content they have, activity, design, age and how freindly the community is.

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WWW and Non-WWW Explained

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If you are an avid web surfer, then you might have noticed that some websites always contain www in their URLs, while others never seem to allow it, even if you try to force it through the address bar.

This phenomenon can be explained using a simple concept: canonicalization

Simply put, it means to define a preferred URL for your web site for search engines and users. Now why would this be such a big deal, you might ask? Well, you see, to a search engine, these two following URLs are completely different pages:

http://umnotablogger.com (try clicking this link… it will be redirected to WWW ;) )
http://www.umnotablogger.com

Consequently, your potential PR (Page Rank) would be divided between these ‘two’ pages. To reduce the damage caused by content duplication, you need to canonicalize your URLs so that only ONE link exists for each resource (page or file).

To do this, you need to create a .htaccess file inside your site root directory and copy/paste ONE of the following code snippets.

WWW to Sans-WWW (non-WWW)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

OR

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Sans-WWW to WWW

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule ^ http://www.domain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

The code snippets provided above work only on Apache servers. Be sure to replace domain.com with your own domain name.