In today’s Journal
* Today, I thought
* Topic: Switching Your Site from HTTP to HTTPS
* If you haven’t
* The numbers
Today, I thought I’d pass along something useful I learned from the newsletter I mentioned in yesterday’s Journal.
Nate Hoffelder mentioned that when you switch your URL from the unsecured http to a secured https, there’s a final step that many writers don’t realize.
Topic: Switching Your Site from HTTP to HTTPS
After you’ve bought a security certificate through your webhost and changed your URL (in Settings) from http to https, you still have some work to do.
You have to go through each page of your website and change all instances of http to https. Otherwise the website won’t work properly.
Yesterday after I sent out the Journal, I spent the balance of the morning doing just that on HarveyStanbrough.com, HEStanbrough.com, and StoneThreadPublishing.com. I even finally transitioned ProWritersWriting to https.
Goodness. Talk about time-consuming! I have 135 pages on HarveyStanbrough.com alone. There are only 32 pages on HEStanbrough.com (a smaller number on PWW), but there are 125 more on StoneThreadPublishing.com. Sigh.
Of course, you can go page by page, use the Find On This Page feature of your browser to find each instance of http: (be sure to include the colon) and then add an S between the P and the colon one instance at a time.
But I came up with a time-cutting method that works well, but is mind-numbingly repetitive. Here’s what you do:
1. Open a blank Notepad (or similar text-only) document.
2. Open the page you want to edit. Make sure you select the Text tab.
3. Press Ctrl+A (or otherwise select everything on the page) then Ctrl+C (or otherwise copy the selection).
4. Go to the Notepad document and press Ctrl+V (or otherwise paste the contents into the Notepad document).
5. In the Edit menu of the Notepad document, select Replace. In Find What, type http:. In Replace With, type https:. Then click Replace All.
6. After Notepad does its magic, put your cursor somewhere in the Notepad document, then hit Ctrl+A again, then Ctrl+C to select all and copy what’s there.
7. Go back to the page you wanted to edit. (Note: If you click on the blue frame at the top, the contents should already still be selected.) Then click Ctrl+V to paste the edited information into your web page.
8. Click Update.
9. Go to the next web page you want to edit and do the same thing.
In my case, for HarveyStanbrough.com alone, I did that 135 times. Still, using this process, the entire site was updated in about an hour.
Then I took a break, moved over to StoneThreadPublishing.com and did the same thing. I saved the Journal (HEStanbrough.com) and then ProWritersWriting for last.
It isn’t that difficult to do, but as I said earlier, it’s a bit mind-numbing. Just take your time. Once you’re done, you shouldn’t have to do it anymore.
***
If you haven’t been keeping up with Dean’s site, check out “New Fantastic Stretch Goal” at https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/new-fantastic-stretch-goal/. Remember, everyone who backs the Kickstarter at even the $5 level gets a lot of stretch goal rewards. Just sayin’.
Grudgingly, I’ll also mention Reedsy’s post “The Best Free Book Cover Makers…” at https://blog.reedsy.com/book-cover-makers/. It might help. While I’m in full-learning mode, I might try a couple of these myself.
Of course, I strongly recommend the current version of Serif PagePlus. I use Serif for all my cover designs. There’s a slight learning curve, but it’s mostly intuitive. Best of all, the cost is low (around $30 or $40 to install it on your computer, no subscription) and it does everything Adobe does.
Talk with you again before too long.
Writing of Blackwell Ops 7: Glynn Marco (novel)
Day 8…… 1253 words. Total words to date…… 15916
Fiction words today…………………… 0
Nonfiction words today…………… 580
Total fiction words for the month……… 0
Total fiction words for the year………… 374653
Total nonfiction words for the month… 2490
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 249200
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 623853
Calendar Year 2019 Novels to Date…………………… 7
Calendar Year 2019 Novellas to Date……………… 1
Calendar Year 2019 Short Stories to Date… 2
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 43
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 195
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31