busybee fluffy rambles

About a year ago I set up Cloudflare as a fronting CDN for this site and my music site because it was the most expedient way of dealing with an AI bot onslaught. It helped a bit but the bots very quickly figured out how to get around all that and while Cloudflare gave me some slightly-better management tools for some stuff, I figured out better approaches to the bot mitigation.

Cloudflare was also super aggressive about caching some stuff that I didn’t want to be cached, and of course, there are many, many political and ideological reasons to not want to use Cloudflare. So my plan was always to switch back to not being under Cloudflare, but the longer I waited the harder it seemed like it would be, due to how SSL certificates work. In particular, I use wildcard Let’s Encrypt certificates, which require DNS to be current, and a big thing that Cloudflare does is… take over your DNS.

But tonight I got a hair up my butt and switched back to my own termination, and it wasn’t too hard to do, with just a little bit of DNS and TLS juggling, and I wanted to minimize my website downtime.

Ughhhh, this has been a heck of a week.

As usual I’ve been full of pain. And my brief surge of enthusiasm for working on music got cut kind of short because of it. But I’m hoping that tomorrow feels better and I can go back to the studio.

I’m also not sure where I stand with my fatigue. The last few days I’ve had to run quick errands by car and those felt fine. But I’m not feeling courageous enough to drive further just yet, especially with how any escape from White Center means following curvy roads which are especially triggering to me.