This blog is now secure by default

Posted on August 30, 2016

A brief programming note: after a fair bit of tinkering and testing over the last few months, I’ve finally pulled the trigger and switched Just Well Mixed over to 100% HTTPS. This means that you should see the green padlock up in your address bar when loading any page on the site.

What does this mean for you, the Longtime Reader™? Not a whole lot, really. If everything goes right, you won’t see any difference except for that little green padlock.

But that’s important, because the green padlock means nobody has tampered with the page as it traveled from me to you. Your ISP hasn’t injected their own ads or tracking codes into it before it reached you, for instance. In that respect, the green padlock is kind of like the little seal that lots of food and pharmaceutical products carry these days; if the seal is broken, you know someone’s been monkeying with your mustard bottle. The green padlock means my mustard can be… trusterd?

(Sorry about that.)

On the implementation end I’m indebted to Let’s Encrypt, a coalition of tech organizations that have put together a set of tools to make upgrading sites to 100% encryption easy and inexpensive. You can’t serve a site over HTTPS without an SSL certificate, and traditionally these have been expensive to acquire and complicated to set up, which has limited adoption. But with Let’s Encrypt certificates are free and implementation is drop-dead simple, which opens up a lot of possibilities for smaller sites like this one.

Anyway, like I said above, this really shouldn’t impact you directly except for providing you with some additional assurances when you browse JWM that nobody’s mucking around with what you see. If you experience any problems you think are related to the shift to HTTPS, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to get them fixed up — just please be as detailed and specific as you can when describing the problem, so I can find it and fix it as quickly as possible.