I hope this is the last I have to write about HTTPS and this site. I’m going to keep this one short and to the point, but I feel I’m going to have to commit to HTTPS only going forward with this site.
This isn’t what I want to do, but in the week or two that I was able to run the site without mandatory HTTPS, I ran into just too many issues in publishing and sharing content to make it worth the idea of me getting extra traffic from “classic” machines and how neat I think it would be for someone on a Windows 95 / DOS machine, or some old System 7 Macintosh being able to access at least a text-only form of the site (text being the most important aspect of the site, after all.)
I have to pick my battles, and here it’s better in the long run to just go with the web-standards flow and be able to publish content without issues in both the actual writing and sharing aspect, than to have old machines be able to access it.
That’s how things go sometimes. I wouldn’t care about HTTPS as it’s not really necessary for this kind of site at all, instead with fucking Chrome “warning” people about “unsafe” pages (those not using HTTPS by default) putting me in a situation where while yes, my target audience is tech-inclined, I still know I’ll get traffic from people who don’t quite know yet what is really going on an how such a warning is poorly worded on Google’s part. I’d rather just avoid the lost traffic or other crap that could come from this.
I’ve strongly considered, as insane as it sounds, just nuking WordPress and the entire current form of the site and switching to old-school hand edited HTML. Of course I quickly realized this is insane, but it would solve these issues but I’d lose every other aspect of the site that I do like. Still, the idea of having such true control is nice, but just not practical for this site and how I produce content for it. Not for now, anyway…
So that’s that. In my typical desire to share with people what’s going on behind the scenes and in my mind with regards to this crazy site, I decided to share that. If I have any other mentions of trying this again, please send me a strongly worded tweet with a link back to this article. I need to quit wasting time on projects like that and focus more on more content.
Righto, more to come, as always.