So, my blog has gone somewhat neglected for a couple years now and I’m sort of blown away by how fast that time went by... Being busy at work, busy with small kids and busy with side projects all meant that my little corner of the Internet dried up like an abandoned lawn in Arizona.

And part of that sad neglect included never adding an SSL certificate to my blog, which means that for some time now various browsers have displayed prominent WARNINGs about these page being NOT SECURE. 😱

So in addition to apologizing for the poor experience to the surprising number of visitors who have still come here over the last couple years, I have a couple pieces of good news:

• First, the blog is coming back to life! Just because I have been posting anything doesn’t mean I haven’t been learning or building anything cool. I have probably the longest list of article stubs ever, and I’ll be filling them in with some great topics and some of the really neat stuff I’ve been learning and thinking about over the last couple years. And then I’ll be sharing them here — can’t wait to hear your great comments and feedback!

• Second, I fixed the SSL issue, and It was easier than I could have imagined. So I wanted to share how I did it for those of you who have your own blogs or web pages. In a word: CloudFlare. The company known for helping protect web sites from distributed denial of service attacks also has free accounts and service for personal pages and blogs, I discovered today. The process is as simple as:

  • Sign up here for a free account
  • Let CloudFlare automatically detect your DNS settings
  • Use CloudFlare’s nameservers for your domain

That’s it! An SSL certificate will be generated and set up automatically within minutes, and you’ll get a useful set of free features like some simple traffic analytics and faster page loads thanks to to CloudFlare’s distributed global content delivery network.

I don’t get anything for promoting CloudFlare, but I was so impressed with how easy they made things for me today (while also being free) that I thought I’d share it with anyone else who might appreciate it!

That’s all for now — stay tuned for the first new post coming later tonight or tomorrow...