I finally removed the floppy disk drive from my desktop. I don’t know why it took me so long, except that it wasn’t in the way of anything. Living with a small, inquisitive child means either making hardware changes at night or keeping the work brief, and timing it so that he still has enough metaphorical spoons to keep his hands to himself.
Category: Tech
HTTPS is a lot easier than it used to be.
The cost of implementing HTTPS on your own site is a lot lower now than it used to be. For instance:
- Let’s Encrypt offers free certificates for any site, and some web hosts have software integration that make ordering, verifying and installing a certificate as simple as checking a box and clicking a button. (I’m impressed with DreamHost. I turned on secure hosting for some of my smaller sites a few months ago by just clicking a checkbox. It generated and installed the certs within minutes, and it’s been renewing them automatically ever since.)
- Amazon now has a certificate manager you can use for CloudFront and other AWS services that’s free (as long as you don’t need static IP addresses, anyway) and only takes a few minutes to set up.
- CloudFlare is offering universal HTTPS even on its free tier. You still need a cert to encrypt the connection between your site and CloudFlare to do it properly, but they offer their own free certs for that. They’ll also let you use a self-signed certificate on the back end if you want. (It’s still not perfect because it’s end-to-Cloudfront-to-End instead of end-to-end, but it’s better than plaintext.)
You may not need a unique IP address anymore. Server Name Indication (SNI) enables HTTPS to work with multiple sites on the same IP address, and support is finally widespread enough to use in most cases. (Unless you need to support IE6 on Windows XP, or really old Android devices.)
Now, if you want the certificate to validate your business/organization, or need compatibility with older systems, you may still want to buy a certificate from a commercial provider. (The free options above only validate whether you control the domain.) And depending on your host, or your chosen software stack if you’re running your own server, you may still have to go through the process of generating a request, buying the cert and going through the validation process, and installing the cert.
But if all you want to do is make sure that your data, and your users’ data, can’t be intercepted or altered in transit when connecting to reasonably modern (2010+) software and devices, it’s a lot less pain than it was even a year ago.
The hard part: Updating all your old links and embedded content. (This is why I’m still working on converting Speed Force and the rest of hyperborea.org in my spare time, though this blog is finally 100% HTTPS.)
And of course dealing with third-party sources. If you connect to someone else’s site, or to an appliance that you don’t control, you have to convince them to update. That can certainly be a challenge.
Expanded from a comment on Apple: iOS to Require HTTPS for Apps by January at Naked Security.
What makes online posts feel “permanent?”
Facebook is testing a feature to hide new posts from your timeline so they don’t feel so permanent. Of course they’re still searchable until you actually delete them, so they’re still permanent in that sense.
What’s odd: Facebook posts don’t feel permanent to begin with, even though they effectively stick around forever.
Thinking about it, two things make an internet post feel permanent to me:
- Can I count on it sticking around?
- Can I count on finding it again?
Facebook, despite a lot of improvements over the years, is a mess. The newsfeed algorithm means you can’t just keep scrolling back. The timeline view isn’t reliably complete. Search is kind of a crap shoot. Don’t get me started on trying to find a particular old post on Twitter!
And that’s dealing with sites I can expect to stay online over time. A post on a forum, or a comment on someone else’s blog, or any social network could easily vanish in someone’s server crash or business shutdown.
If I can’t count on being able to find what I post a few years down the line, it feels like it’s temporary, even if it isn’t.
This is one reason that my Flickr portfolio feels more permanent than my Instagram photos: I can find them without resorting to third-party apps. If I want to find a particular photo on Instagram, I have to page down through my profile until I find it. On Flickr, I can find a 10-year-old photo of a fountain in seconds by searching for “fountain” and expanding the “Your photos” section of the results.
Then again, running my own site is only reliable as long as I can afford it. If something happens to me, and I can’t pay for hosting anymore, what then? I figure I’d simplify things down to where I could get a basic, super-cheap hosting plan. Make the blogs read-only so they can be served statically from a shared server or S3 bucket, or move them to WordPress.com, or just be willing to let them crash under load. But what if I’m incapacitated and can’t convert it? Or just plain not there anymore? If I really want to keep my corner of the web up “permanently,” I’m going to have to make a plan ahead of time.
Otherwise my carefully preserved photos, articles, and extended musings will be toast…leaving behind as context only broken links and all my supposedly (but not really) ephemeral offhand remarks on Twitter and Facebook.
Remember Netbooks?
It’s weird to look back on all the posts I made agonizing about whether or not to buy a netbook.
It was never anything I would have used on a regular basis, and I knew that (which is why I never went through with buying one). It would have been something I used on trips, mainly conventions, and only to overcome the shortcomings of late 2000s smartphones.
Mainly: photos and typing.
It’s still painfully slow to type anything of length on a phone, but tablets have emerged since then and are a lot easier to type on. Hybrids like the Surface Pro and add-on keyboards make it even easier.
Touchscreens have solved the crappy trackpad problem netbooks had.
Faster phones and cell networks, and a more mobile-friendly web, have made a lot more things possible directly on the phone.
Netbooks, meanwhile, are pretty much forgotten, at least in the form they existed in at the time. Chromebooks are doing OK, at least in schools, but they aren’t quite the same thing. You’d think “netbook” would refer to something more like the network-dependent Chromebook, but it typically referred to the tiny form factor of a mini-laptop.
Looking back at the Tori Amos signing that I mentioned in the series’ first post: These days I probably would have taken the pictures directly on my phone and posted to Instagram within minutes. As for the blogging, I might have powered through on the phone and added the pictures directly, or I might have done so on the tablet and added the pictures that would already have synced from the phone over WiFi.
I wouldn’t carry a laptop of any size around the convention floor, that’s for sure. And I probably wouldn’t bring one on a short trip at all unless I was planning on working during the evenings.
Why I Hate Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll is like finishing a sandwich, and the server plops another one in front of you without asking what you want on it, or if you want it at all. If you’re full, or you don’t like what they chose? Too bad, it’s on your plate now! To make matters worse, sometimes if you put the sandwich down for a moment to eat some chips, they’ll think you’re done and swap your sandwich for a different one!
Slate just replaced pagination with infinite scroll on their articles. Yes, pagination sucks. A multi-page article on the web is like a burger that’s been sliced up into wedges, and you only get one wedge at a time, forcing you to go back to the counter every few bites. But infinite scroll isn’t an improvement.
Both approaches impose the wrong structure on a single unit. Search results and timelines are one thing, but for an individual piece of content, the best way to map it to a web page…is to just map it to a web page.
Update (Sep 2016): Combined with giant images and complex layouts that slow down browser rendering (*cough* CBR), it’s even worse. To continue the lunch analogy:
- You order a sandwich with a cup of soup and a side salad.
- After an interminable wait, you get the sandwich and soup, but no salad, and no spoon. The waiter rushes off before you can say anything.
- Eventually you’re able to flag someone down and ask for the spoon and the salad.
- You munch on the sandwich by itself, which is at least a decent sandwich.
- Finally the waiter comes back with a whole pizza, and takes away your half-eaten sandwich.
- You still don’t have a spoon, but that doesn’t matter because the waiter took the soup too.