Journal

Tagged: https

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What I learnt today: things to remember when switching to HTTPS

Ever since I set up a micropub endpoint, I used OwnYourGram to syndicate photos I post to Instagram back to my own site. This evening I tried to post a delicious photo as usual but nothing showed on my site.

I started investigating immediately and found OwnYourGram throwing an authentication error. Then I checked my micropub endpoint script to find my site still configured as http instead of https. I changed it to the proper protocol and I also had to change the URL on my Instagram profile page.

I guess switching to HTTPS works really well, as long as you remember to change all your configuration files and profile pages accordingly. I’ll surely need to remember that. At least that’s what I learnt today.

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What I learnt today: setting up SSL

Today I finally managed to set up SSL. To be fair, the company I host my site with did all the heavy lifting. As of today, I’m serving all my content over HTTPS – a step I’ve been wanting to take for quite a while now.

After the certificate was in place, I ran a test on ssllabs.com and I was pretty pleased with the results. Everything seemed to work fine so I went and looked at my site in Safari, expecting to see a little lock beneath my domain name.

Except that there was no lock. I checked the settings and the protocol until I opened up Chrome to see what the dev tools could tell me about this. As it turns out, my site was referencing a tracking script from a subdomain which was not served over HTTPS. That caused Safari (and Chrome as well) to flag the site as not completely secure. I made the script available from my main domain and now everything works as expected. And that’s what I learnt today.