A while ago, I noticed that my homespun websites, such as this one here, started coming up as “insecure.” I wondered why.

As it often happens, it’s because Google is being an asshole.

As of July 23, it turns out, Chrome had called out every website without an active SSL certificate as “Not Secure.” This means every website. Every last one. Even if you’re just a dinky blog or a simple index page with a few links and images.

Fortunately, my beautiful Dreamhost makes it easy to place a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate onto the site. Otherwise, it would have been at least $15 a year for the verified SSL, which I would need if I ran e-commerce.

What does this mean? It means some browsers won’t flag my beloved AITWK site as unsafe, and that Google Chrome will no longer deny me my little padlock and say NOT SECURE in big bold print in your browser.

I also had to make an .htaccess file to force yinz to the https protocol if you get here via http. That wasn’t too bad either.

So, hooray, padlock!

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