Back when I started really getting into web development and coding, SSL certificates and having your website start with https:// wasn’t really a common thing. I helped run a few other websites for e-commerce companies, and they needed SSL certificates to ensure their clients’ information wouldn’t be stolen, but I personally didn’t sell anything on my own website, so I never bothered with it. … This was nearly two decades ago.

Nowadays, having an SSL certificate is considered normal and standard for all websites, even if you don’t sell products. They’re also free now, very contrary to having to pay a decent chunk of money for them a decade or so ago. I like to keep up with modern trends and make sure things are secure, but I hesitated from immediately implementing an SSL certificate – not because I didn’t care to do it, but because I realized there was something I did a handful of years ago that would make SSL certificate implementation extremely difficult.

Namely, when I set up my .htaccess file to have rewrite rules for formatting my website’s URLs, I did so in a very disorganized and makeshift manner that was incredibly inefficient. Basically, I dreaded having to go back and try to understand my thought process from several years ago in order to reverse engineer it, implement the rewrite rules properly, then make sure there were no infinite redirect loops that would keep forwarding the https:// URLs to http://.

It was obviously a waste of time that could’ve been avoided if I did it properly the first time, but I managed to put in an extra 15 or so minutes to get everything fully figured out and for the SSL certificate to work properly. … Or so I thought.

My next problem? When I went to my brand new https:// website, Google Chrome insisted on telling me that the website, although it had an SSL certificate, wasn’t actually secure – it claimed that I was loading stuff from insecure sources. That was definitely reasonable, and I spent an additional 15 minutes combing through the rest of my code and making sure all my scripts and extra includes were being called securely via their https:// versions.

But that still didn’t work.

And here ensured a series of events worthy of Benny Hill music, where I went around in circles trying to figure out why my website kept calling an insecure version of my header font. It ended up being a combination of the font being hosted in an unexpectedly different theme folder for some reason, combined with the fact that I use both W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare caching at the same time for website speed optimization.

After spending yet again an extra additional 15 minutes on that alone, after nearly an hour, my SSL certificate was installed and active on my website.

As for the lesson of the day… make sure you keep a log of notes of all the stuff you’ve done in the past. If not, then at least do things correctly the first time.

Ever since I created a new splash landing page for my website, I’ve had some videos embedded in it.

Over time, I realized that a lot of people thought that the videos were just that – videos. Most people weren’t alert enough to realize that I had actually embedded entire playlists, and once the video was over, another one from the same playlist would automatically play.

In order to make it more obvious, I did a bit of coding today, with the help of jakiestfu.

Now, there is absolutely no question that you are able to watch multiple videos per video player on my home page, as there is a very noticeable list of videos to the right of the actual video.

A passive plus side to implementing this new embedded playlist is that the height of the whole thing is shorter, so I was able to get room to embed even more playlists.

Upon receiving the little notification in the top of my WordPress dashboard letting me know that version 4.0 of the content management system had been made available, I used the auto upgrade feature to get my site up to date with the latest release.

So far there hasn’t really been anything particularly noticeable or amazing about the new version. Of course, this comes from a five-month break from using WordPress, so I’m sure that I don’t really re­member all the nuances of the previous version anyway. Overall, it seems like the look and feel of 4.0 is almost identical to what it used to be (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing).

I checked out the patch notes for the new version over on WordPress’ website, and according to them, it seems like the biggest differences are in the editing and media panels. Unfortunately, I do all my content creation using the “Text” tab where I write my blog posts in raw source code. So, it seems like I won’t really be taking full advantage of all the media-related stuff that was added in.

On this day five months ago, I made a post stating that I would be taking a break from publishing new con­tent on my website.

Coincidentally (but not really), it happened to be on April Fool’s Day. A lot of people thought that I was joking. But, as time went on, they started realizing that I wasn’t actually playing around.

What I intended to do during that time was publish an entire redesign of my entire website with a lot more features, better graphics, and overall a better way to present all the content I would be posting. Unsurprisingly, that was a lot harder than I thought it would be, especially because I was so occupied with so many other things going on. To jump to the “tl;dr” version of the story, I basically got almost noth­ing done.

I fiddled around with my landing page for a bit, moving some highlights around and sticking some more in, then opened the template editor in WordPress a few times only to get repeatedly overwhelmed and scared away.

So, we’re basically almost back to square one.

Actually, we never actually even left the first square to begin with.

Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.

I decided to throw a quick post up on my blog to let you guys know that I will be working on some pret­ty large changes to my website within the upcoming months. During this time, I will be making very little to no new content posts.

At the end of this period, I hope for my website to have a completely new design with far greater functionality. I am also attempting to turn my blog into more of my own personal social network feed (this means more posts in general throughout the day, and more different types of content overall).

In the meantime, if you want to keep up with me, I recommend following @Parkzer on Twitter. If there is something urgent or personal, you are welcome to send me an email or use the contact form on my website. If you are one of my close friends, this doesn’t mean I’m disappearing for a few months, it just means I won’t be posting on my blog. I’ll still be around, and nothing will be different about me outside of my website.

If you’re eager to see the changes, I will be publishing them live in segments throughout the next hand­ful of months. Feel free to check back every few weeks or so to see if I’ve made any noticeable progress.

If you’re a frequent visitor to my website, you might have noticed that for the past day, my website was down.

Normally, when something goes wrong, I can usually figure out the problem and fix it within a few hours because I have access to the main server, as my friend owns it. However, this time, when I tried to go to the core of the problem to fix it … well I couldn’t. The core was missing.

I went to my friend’s website, which is hosted on the same server as mine, and his website seemed to have disappeared as well. I scratched my head in confusion, then texted my friend.

A few hours later, I get a text back:

“Omg I forgot to pay the bill.”

Yes, he had received a few notifications letting him know that he was supposed to pay his bill, but ap­parently he somehow still forgot. As a result, the company that maintains his physical server cut off his service, and both our websites, as well as the control panel that manages the server, went down.

So here’s your tip of the day: pay your bills. Or else your friend’s website might randomly die for a day.