GNU Terry Pratchett
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." — Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue
It is Sir Terry Pratchett's birthday today so here is a quick guide on how to setup the GNU Terry Pratchett Tribute using Cloudflare.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the clacks are a series of semaphore towers loosely based on the concept of the telegraph. Invented by an artificer named Robert Dearheart, the towers could send messages "at the speed of light" using standardized codes. Three of these codes are of particular import:
G: send the message on
N: do not log the message
U: turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back againWhen Dearheart's son John died due to an accident while working on a clacks tower, Dearheart inserted John's name into the overhead of the clacks with a "GNU" in front of it as a way to memorialize his son forever (or for at least as long as the clacks are standing.) — GNUTerryPratchett.com
How to Add 'X-Clacks-Overhead' to Cloudflare
Log into your Cloudflare dashboard, go to your website, select Rules>Transform Rules then click on Modify Response Header
Click 'Create Rule', and give it a useful name like 'GNU Terry Pratchett':
Select 'All Incoming Requests' under 'When Incoming Requests Match':
Finally, choose 'Set Static', enter the header name of 'X-Clacks-Overhead' and the value of 'GNU Terry Pratchett':
Finally, click 'Deploy'.
You can check that it's working by running 'curl -v https://semaj.omg.lol' and checking the headers that come back:
[Note from 2026 - I changed my blog, and do not directly use Cloudflare myself anymore!]
To respond on your own website, write a post which contains a link to this post - then enter the URl of your page here. Learn more about WebMentions.