I’m Green

I’m not talking about my meticulous recycling habits.

I’ve finally jumped aboard the https-everywhere bandwagon. This site is now encrypted, with a proper SSL certificate, as you can see from the reassuring green padlock in your browser’s address bar.

Http requests are redirected to secure ones.

In fact, I had been offering an optional https version of the site for a while, but after I let my certificate expire, it came with a warning label. The outfit that I had used to get my certificates was too convoluted to deal with, so I wasn’t motivated to revisit the issue until I became convinced that https as a default was really the way to go.

The process at Let’s Encrypt is about as convenient as it gets. The certificates are free and accepted in all the browsers. They’re associated with the Linux Foundation and the Internet Security Research Group.

They even offer a script you can run to retrieve and install the certificates for all your domains, and even set up your webserver configuration files to use them. If, as I did, you already have https configurations set up for your domains, use the certonly option to the script to install the certificates but to not touch the configurations. Then all you need to do is add the lines to point to the new locations of the certificates and an SSL configuration file that Let’s Encrypt installs. You can install a certificate for a dummy domain without the option to see what these lines should look like.

Now that it’s so simple to set this up, and free, I’ll join the cheering squad for https and urge all the webmasters out there to get on it.