If you are reading this successfully via my site, or some RSS feed, it means that my blog migration has been successful. I'm unfortunately a typical internet technologist in some regards - if the internet machines are working, I don't tend to spend much time maintaining them or planning any upgrades. The upcoming expiration of my domain name and shutdown of a trial VPS I had running for some time kicked me into action and I finally got around to moving the blog. It's now running on an OpenVZ container (hence the firewall conundrum recently posted about) and I have a basic StartSSL free certificate in place to enable HTTPS.

Since basically all links currently point to the unencrypted version of the site, I have the webserver rewriting all incoming requests to the HTTPS version. Chris Siebenmann recently wrote at length on migrations to HTTPS, the virtues of automatic rewrites from every page on your site to the corresponding HTTPS version and various other concerns surrounding ciphers, protocols and SSL/TLS stacks. I have a fairly low care factor at the moment for most of these, and consider it to be at least a reasonable step forward to have HTTPS support at all.

Perhaps the most irritating aspect was having to do a text replacement on the database, due to many pages having explicit http:// links to images and other pages on the blog. In future I hope I can use relative links and links which reuse the same scheme as the page they are linked from (now that I finally know about them - e.g. //www.foo.com/index.html). Somewhat more interesting will be IPv6, which is also now a possibility. Huzzah, progress!