Over the last week, I decided to spend some money and improve my website. This was for two reasons: 1) make it more accessible with quicker load times, and 2) increase my audience’s privacy. In order to do that, I upgraded my hosting server with more “stuff” (super technical term) to handle requests and queries. Also, I have a few more tricks to improve the speed of delivery but didn’t enable these tricks, because they will probably take a hefty time configuring and testing. If you feel it is moving to slow, go to the Contact Me page, send me an email, and I will enable them.
But here are the great improvements to you! I added a SSL certificate to my domain, which means that certain pages will appear as HTTPS. HTTPS is a protocol that will encrypt communications from your computer to my website and vice versa. What does this mean? Well when you are on public WiFi, the owner of that WiFi can actually see your data if they smart (it is called packet sniffing). These “packets” contain data you are sending to websites (passwords, usernames, you favorite cat picture, you know everything). So, if a website isn’t encrypted they can pull passwords, confidential information, emails, and anything that you are doing… unless it is HTTPS. HTTPS wraps up all your information in a nice encryption before sending it to my server, then my server unencrypts it, and then makes it comprehensible for the computer. While the data is still available for sniffing, it is now gobbledegook unless a lot of time and hardware is used to make it legible. This security feature has been added to all pages that you may need to put your email in (subscription page, contact me page) or your username/password combo (login, registration). You cannot access these pages without HTTPS, because I am forcing it from my website to you. This means your safety is automatic. Now, even if you reuse the same password (almost all of us do) it wont be intelligible when you sign into the website.
Thank you for reading! As always, I hope you enjoy the improvements and my transparency in how I am managing my website. If you have further concerns, want to talk, or want to send me hate mail please go to the Contact Me page.