In an effort to re-acquaint myself with the difficulties associated with running an SSL site, I've added HTTPS to this one. If you've arrived using an old link, you should be redirected to the new one that matches the certificate. In some cases, the redirection is failing, and I'm working on it; apologies if you're one of the afflicted.

For some time, a half-dozen vanity domains have pointed to the same place, and now they all redirect to the same domain name instead of just using the same "document root" (and other configuration items) in the Apache server configuration. This has not been without its difficulties.

It's taken some banging to get the right RewriteRule (they all looked like they should have worked) to send along the right redirection. Lost path parts and query strings, not to mention failures of form posting (which is usually related to a form having an absolute URL for some reason, which then requires a redirect, but the POST data is lost).

It's taken some effort to get the RewriteCond to accurately recognize the wrong domain names and that the request is HTTP and not HTTPS. I suppose I could allow HTTP and HTTPS, but that's not as fun or reliable to play with. I'm about to break down and do it though.

Google Analytics don't work with SSL. Neither does Google AdSense. Both of these are really for my benefit, and not in the "bring me traffic and money" way, but more in a "how do the tools work?" effort to understand. Since neither of them support HTTPS, both of them crab, and in certain browsers, fail to load. Also, some of the off-site scripts I use that do support SSL have some validation failures with their certificates (usually a name mismatch).

Related, but not breaking things, I've found how many of my blog entries and app bits have absolute URLs for links or scripts or images or something like that. Must have been old code... Images just warn of "insecure content," or don't appear, which is simply annoying. Scripts can fail to run, which causes problems. Links simply cause additional unnecessary redirections.

Curiously, the main domain itself, jekewa.com, doesn't act right if you hit it with http://jekewa.com as it warns you that you don't have permission instead of recognizing the HTTPS is missing and redirecting you. It is the case that this domain name is on a different IP than the others; since SSL happens before HTTPS, the certificate required the server to have a different IP. Although it seems the virtual host for the HTTP of that domain is configured the same as the other domain names that do correctly redirect (like http://jkwarren.info does), it fails nonetheless. I'm still working on this one.

Really, once I get it all working, I'll open up HTTP again and not force HTTPS. There's really nothing transacting on my servers that need to be secured. It's all for maintaining and improving my mad skilz.