Author: chris

Renewing a let’s encrypt certificate made even simpler: automatically

I have written about renewing certificates from Let’s Encrypt in the past, and to the project developers’ credit, they keep making the process of getting, installing and renewing certificates easier. There’s a new client called certbot (and certbot-auto) that can be used to almost completely automate the certificate process. As an added bonus, the certbot client’s --webroot method allows you to renew without having to stop your web server and restart, and you no longer need to pause services like Cloudflare.
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Prevent Jquery Mobile popups from auto-closing in iOS

If you need to automatically/programmatically open a popup on iOS/Safari using Jquery Mobile, you will likely see your popup flash by very quickly and then close on its own. This is a huge annoyance, as there are times when an automatic popup is required, such as for on-load disclaimers, or confirmations.
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Adding a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to an NGINX site

UPDATE, September 2017: Most of this information is now of historic/hacker value, as Let’s Encrypt has added Nginx support to the Certbot client, making the process MUCH simpler and quicker. However, it’s still worth reading through this how-to, as it could help you look out for places where things could go wrong.

A good friend recommended the free SSL certificate services offered by Let’s Encrypt. I thought I would give it a try and switch this site to HTTPS-only, and share the results of the process here.

First off, Let’s Encrypt is a “free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit.” Their certificates are provided by the  Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). In short, it’s legit.

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Nginx 404 redirect tips and tricks

There are some very simple NGINX site configuration changes that can alter the way your site responds to requests for non-existent pages.

For example, you can redirect all requests that return a 404 to either a specific page, or your default index page. Just note that this can be very confusing when you’re troubleshooting a site and are constantly returned to your index page. You could be seeing proper requests, or false positives. The NGINX access logs will show a 200 status for all requests. This can be very crazy-making when you are trying to figure out why a URI isn’t rendering. Caveat emptor.

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Migrating from Drupal to WordPress

I just moved this site from Drupal 7 to WordPress 4.3. The times, they are a changing, and my work has been far more focused on WordPress than it has been on Drupal. So it made less and less sense to maintain a Drupal site. Also, for a relatively simple personal blog, Drupal’s capabilities and overhead were overkill for my purposes.

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CSS tables with sortable columns using TinySort

Try searching for “CSS table sortable columns”. Good luck. Most of the sortable table libraries require that your data be in an HTML table. But you lose a lot of responsive flexibility when you use HTML tables. This presents you with a lousy choice: sortable columns and limited responsive design options, or responsive design options, and no sortable columns. I’m sure there are complex solutions to this which would involve sending different content based on browser or resolution detection, but that’s sounds like a maintenance nightmare.

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How to add a GeoTrust SSL certificate to Nginx on Ubuntu

I had a bit of trouble finding the information I needed to get a certificate I purchased from GeoTrust installed on an Nginx server. The reseller I used – cheapsslsecurity.com – sent me a set of certificate files that didn’t match any of the instructions in GeoTrust’s support pages. Nginx configuration information is available on Digital Ocean’s support site. If you are running WordPress, there’s some useful information here.

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Risk: Working around it, or working with it

Building on several conversations I’ve had over the last year around the evolution of organizations – and companies, it’s people I’m really talking about here – I tried to illustrate the evolving picture of what is coming together for me.

First off, the word of the day for me is “risk”. We use all kinds of words to talk and dance around risk – how we deal with it, how we try to avoid it, how we acknowledge it, and how we want to be able to live with it, and even be able to embrace it.

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