Month: December 2021

This blog is more than twenty years old, can you believe it? I was one of the first pioneers in those days who dared explore the rough seas of the emerging Internet by setting up my own personal website. In all that time, I have been able to sustain things just fine using an old version of Movable Type which back in those days was quite the hype and advanced tool.

Since then much has happened in the wonderful world of Internet, but I have never felt a need to change anything about this old-fashioned blogging tool. Built, configured and up and running. It's been working just fine, so why change it?

Famous last words. A couple weeks ago, my Internet savvy daughter warned me that this website was not safe. She noticed that the lock icon was missing. Still using plain vanilla http as it was meant to be back in the good old days. Now we have to be overly cautious and secure everything we do on the Internet, especially including websites.

I ignored her warnings (sorry Sabien) figuring that no one would want to hack such a boring website like this. But lo and behold, no more than two days later it happened, hacked and broken real good.

Okay I get the hint now, so it was high time to do something about it. The big bad world of Internet is going to pot.

Purchased and installed an SSL certificate, and as you can now see by the little lock in the url, the connection is secure and the certificate is valid:

I managed to find an old article (2010) explaining how to do this, which was very helpful. Without this archaic information, I'm sure that I never would have been able to figure it out on my own.

See: Secure the Back End of Movable Type 4 (or 5): SSL and Mod Rewrite.