Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Enabling HTTPS is easy

To see how easy I looked how well it is supported in a bunch of free software blog aggregator sites.

The cobbler's shoes have no children.

8 comments:

  1. Offtopic, but why is everything "planet"?

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  2. Can you point to any Planet that does have HTTPS working?

    It would require the Planet to host all of the media itself (scripts, images, embedded videos).

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    1. Partial HTTPS is probably good enough, but those account only for 4/9 of these sites. The rest are just plain broken. In theory some planets could require that the blogs they aggregate must be served over HTTPS (though that is quite a harsh requirement ATM and probably not feasible).

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  3. It's not really a harsh requirement tbh considering search engines are already requiring HTTPS for rankings. If people want their images to show up over planet then they should be running over HTTPS. It's 2017. Not sure how planet admins communicate with the bloggers it aggregates but maybe an automated system which sends out a mail to individuals when planet fails to publish content hosted insecurely would be a good approach. If this is a common problem across different planets then maybe there is space for collaboration. And setting HTTPS is pretty easy, I suspect the problem with planets is dealing with blogs that are not being maintained. In that case it doesn't matter how easy its made for people, if others are bending over backwards for them then they are unlikely to spend an hour or two fixing anything.

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  4. Ok, call me dense, but “the cobbler’s shoes have no children?” If the cobbler is a free software blog aggregator site, and “shoes” refers to HTTPS support that actually works, who are the nonexistent children?

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    1. It's an intentional misspelling of the English phrase "The cobbler's children have no shoes" (sometimes written as "The cobbler's children go barefoot").

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    2. Ok, thanks. I am still not sure what you were getting at by inverting the aphorism, it seems that the standard construction would make more sense. Great blog btw, glad I ran across it on HN.

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