Secured my site with Let’s Encrypt

You might notice if you browse this blog now, that it’s served over HTTPS. I’ve even added an Apache configuration to redirect plain HTTP requests to secure HTTPS and I’ve spent the last few days checking the pages for URLs including non-secure content and rewriting them to use HTTPS where possible, or otherwise removing them. You’ll also notice in the left-hand corner of the browser’s address bar, there’s a (hopefully familiar) little green lock which indicates:

  • your communication with the site is encrypted well
  • the authenticity of the site is verified by a trusted authority

Of those, the latter usually involves paying a trusted certificate authority a lot of money to verify and sign your site’s certificate so that browsers will mark it trusted. Security is important but this high cost often creates a barrier for small companies wanting to use https. Continue reading

CSS for TODO Elements

I wrote a small CSS class .todo for cases when you want to mark HTML elements on a page that you still want to work on later. Add this class to elements that aren’t ready yet, to mark them so that you won’t forget about them and ship the site unfinished. See the Gist’s description on GitHub for more information on how to use it. Here’s the code:

/* CSS for adding TODO notes on WIP pages */
div.todo { /* style the text in a bright box */
  color: red;
  font-size: large;
    background-color: yellow;
    text-align: center;
    border: 3px solid red;
    border-bottom: 1px solid red;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    padding: 1px;
}
div.todo:before { /* prepend the word TODO to the text */
    font-weight: bold;
    content: "↓ TODO: "
}
div.todo+* { /* style the following element in a bright box too */
    border: 3px solid red;
    border-top: 0;
    margin-top: 0;
}

The End of a Great Blog

To my great dismay, K. Mandla has decided to discontinue K.Mandla’s blog of Linux experiences.

K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiencesI first came across it when it was mentioned in a post on another blog I was looking at, which challenged readers to try to use their computers without the Graphical User Interface for just a day! I accepted the challenge and after using Arch Linux for the first time and reading around on K. Mandla’s blog for a while I learned a lot about powerful and efficient ways of using the computer and giving use to low-end hardware. K. Mandla talked about things like  lessism vs minimalism and maximalism, a word that might better describe his idea of minimalism, and I agree.

His blog was a great resource for people who keep things light and get the most out of the technology they have. It has a huge list of software and a wiki too. He used to post very regularly, about once a day, but although the site is still online, he won’t be making any more additions. This was without a doubt my favourite blog, probably the only blog I actually read. I’m not sure I’ll ever write that much on here, I haven’t even written anything for the last 4 months or so, but I somehow hope I can carry on what K. Mandla started and share my useful ideas and information with you.

“Be kind to one another. We’re all we’ve got.” —K.Mandla

Safe and Easy Passwords

I was reading something by a friend of mine about an easy way to remember a large number of passwords. I had some comments on it but I was writing a bit too much to fit in a comment box so I’ve moved it here instead.

The basic idea is that because it’s inadvisable to use the same password across multiple networks because, possibly amongst other things, if someone knows one of your passwords then they have access to everything you do online! So it was suggested that you pick something memorable, for instance you might be a proud supporter of Liverpool F.C., so you take the word “liverpool” and prepend the first letter of whatever service the password is for to that. For example:

Twitter: tliverpool
Facebook: fliverpool
Identica: iliverpool
Gmail: gliverpool
Jabber: jliverpool
And so on…

Now, while in principle this might be an easy way to remember passwords, there are some problems with it, so I’d like to add a bit more. Continue reading