Converting the Entire Site from HTTP to HTTPS

…was painful.

Instructions for making the change effective throughout WordPress were easy enough to find and follow, but updating references in 250-ish posts by hand took some time. I had two hassles. The first was my own doing in that I put all of the local images in a named directory rather than using the WordPress way of referring to local content. This means I know where everything is and can move the WordPress installation anywhere I want without having to worry about the directory tree that it would build. The downside is that I have to include a fully qualified path to each piece of content. Oh well. The other hassle is the general issue that linking to unsecure content on a secure page makes the browser report unsecure content (in most browsers this means showing a warning symbol over the lock symbol at the left end of the browser’s address bar. There are some ugly workarounds for this involving various browser- and server-side scripts but I found it easier to find replacement images in ten or so cases that were hosted on secure pages.

Changing over the non-WordPress pages was pretty straightforward. I’m in the middle of redoing a lot of those pages anyway.

I was moved to do this because the slides.com tool I used to build yesterday’s presentation doesn’t much like serving insecure content, either. It made the editing process harder because I couldn’t easily see what I was working with and when I gave the presentation I had to do so with my browser’s security purposefully turned off. It’s not a big deal in the short run but over time it’ll be easier to just do it “right.” I updated the slides to reflect the new information and, as I think about it, I should also check the references to the site I’ve placed on LinkedIn and elsewhere. I also updated the settings in the FTP access tool I’ve been using.

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