[OH-Dev] CloudFlare for the OpenHatch site (and a few bugs created)

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey all,

Last weekend, I wanted to improve the loading times and reliability of the 
OpenHatch site, so I started donating CloudFlare service.

CloudFlare is a "content delivery network", which is to say when visitors 
go the OpenHatch website, now they connect to a server operated by 
CloudFlare, which itself may be showing the visitor a cached version of 
the page. This usually can improve the speed with which a pgae loads 
dramatically, as CloudFlare has servers all around the world. This is 
likely to especially help with regard to the OpenHatch blog. It also has 
the upside that if our server takes too long to respond to a request, 
CloudFlare will show a helpful error message to the visitor.

This has a few negative ramifications, which I wanted to write an email 
about so that we're all on the same page. I'll be looking into addressing 
these; sorry to spring them on everyone.

https://openhatch.org/wiki/Static_site_hosting requires a change -- 
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Static_site_hosting/create specifically talks 
about using linode.com for DNS, but now we use cloudflare.com for DNS.

In the svn training mission, Subversion interactions are failing. This is 
because the IP address that openhatch.org resolves to is no longer the 
main OpenHatch server (linode.openhatch.org), and the svn checkouts are 
using the svn port/protocol. If we use HTTP as the transport, they should 
work okay (untested, but I believe it should work). This is a good idea 
generally, as it avoids problems with people's firewalls or ISPs with 
weird port permissions.

We might have a similar problem with the git training mission? I am not 
sure. But similarly, we should switch that to use the HTTP transport for 
git, for the above reasons.

This is unrelated to the forwarder.openhatch.org problems that were 
reported earlier.

Sorry about the abrupt switch. I should have sent a mail like this before 
doing the switch, I now realize.

-- Asheesh.