credit Alvesgaspar – CC-BY-SA
We’re joining the big leagues. No longer will the big guys look down their noses at our unsecured website. Now you’ll see that reassuring lock up there by the location bar along with that fully modern “https.” Don’t you feel safe now?
I was just waiting until it was free and easy to do. Let’s Encrypt went a long way toward that by creating a “free, automated, and open certificate authority.” Now you can get a certificate for your website without paying a for-profit certificate authority. That makes it easy for your web host to provide encryption for your site without having to charge you for it. Then it was a simple matter of calling up my host and asking them to install Let’s Encrypt on my site.
Well, not quite. The server I was on wouldn’t support it so they had to move Green Comet to another server. That meant it had a new address and the internet name servers had to propagate it, so we were in limbo for a while. You might have noticed we were hard to reach, but now we’re in business.
Almost. Now all the calls for http://greencomet.org have to be changed to https://greencomet.org. My head reeled! But this is computers and what are computers for if not to automate things? I found out I could edit a file on the site called htaccess that gives visiting computers special instructions when they arrive. Now if someone comes in looking for the old URL, it’s automatically changed to the new one. So now we’re good. I think.
Free but not so easy.
rjb
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