All the web stuff at polarweasel.org should be encrypted-only now. In other words, when you visit a page on the blog, or on the main site, you should see the little lock-icon thingy — or whatever your browser uses — in the address bar.

For my own future reference, and maybe yours too, here’s what I did.

These sites are hosted on Dreamhost, which makes it really easy (two clicks) to get a Let’s Encrypt certificate. So I did that for the various sites.

Then, I forced the web server (Apache, in this case) to redirect all non-encrypted requests to the encrypted site instead. To do that, I added this sort of thing to each site’s .htaccess file:

# Force all connections to go over SSL
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://sitename.org/$1 [R,L]

(Writing it that way, with no conditions, should guarantee a 500 error if mod_rewrite is disabled for some reason.)

That’s all you need to do for a static site. For the WordPress sites, you need to do a couple more things: set the site URLs in the Settings – General menu to https instead of http, and add the following to the site’s wp-config.php file, right above the “stop editing here” line:

define('FORCE_SSL', true);
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

And that’s it. More or less.

Note: If any of your pages have hard-coded (http://something) links in them, including calls to CSS stylesheets or Javascript, instead of relative (/something) links, you’ll need to update those. Relative links are your friends; use them.

So, I read Let’s Play a Minimalism Game Together by The Minimalists, and sent it to my friend Anne this week.

No time like the present. November’s the month.

This ought to be interesting. My daily tally will be below the fold on this post.

Continue reading →

UPDATE A subsequent update fixed the problem. Or at least didn’t re-create the problem.

HP software update 2.10 came out recently for Lion and Mountain Lion, and causes apps to crash when you try to print. If this is happening to you, here’s what to do about it.

Delete this:

/Library/Printers/hp/PDEs/hpPostScriptPDE.plugin

(You’ll need to provide authorization, either with sudo or by giving an administrator password to Finder.)

There is no step 2.

I’ve had a few discussions recently about the value a technical writer can bring to an organization. Unsurprisingly, given what I do for a living, the discussions have centered around the value a very technical writer brings to the table.

Clearly, it’s time to write some of this down.

Continue reading →