Blog (and other Qiqitori sites) now accessible via HTTPS

Thanks to Let’s Encrypt, this blog and other sites under the Qiqitori domain are now accessible via HTTPS.

I used to have HTTPS accessibility a couple years ago, but had to open up port 443 for other purposes (circumventing a work firewall). I’ve long left that workplace and since Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are free, things are back in place now. I’m about one year late to jump on the Let’s Encrypt bandwagon, but that’s mostly because I try to avoid being an early adopter sometimes.

Getting this to work was a whole lot easier than assumed:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list
# insert:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main
# save and exit editor
apt-get update
apt-get install python-certbot-apache -t jessie-backports

# easy option; probably doesn't require manual config editing if your config is straightforward:
certbot --apache
 
# or below command is for people who are familiar with the process (perhaps after having added the first two subdomains):
certbot --apache certonly --domains subdomain.qiqitori.com # requires manual config editing

Don’t worry, the only thing (as far as I can tell) that certbot is doing to your config is change the paths to the SSL certiticate files. You’ll also be asked which file to edit. So maybe just backup your config file, try the automatic command first and then inspect.

One more thing: this blog is running on WordPress, and apparently image tags (with their src attribute) seem to be hard-linked in the database. I don’t have a lot of articles with images, so I thought I’d just try to fix them manually:

select id from wp_posts where post_status='publish' and post_content like '%src="http://blog.%';

This yielded only four IDs, which I then fixed in the normal post editor (change from the “Visual” tab to the “Text” tab) in the admin interface. If you have internal links:

select id from wp_posts where post_status='publish' and post_content like '%href="http://blog.%';

Rather than changing ‘http://’ to ‘https://’, you might want to use ‘//’, which is protocol-agnostic and chooses whatever the current page was loaded over.

Twitter and Google+

We’re now on Twitter and Google+! Hope we’ll come up with some good tweets. Got to be careful not to turn it into a microblog for Visio haters. ;D

Wir sind jetzt auch auf Twitter und Google+! Hoffe, dass uns bald ein paar gute Tweets einfallen werden, und dass die Angelegenheit nicht zu einem Anti-Visio-Microblog verkommt. ;D

Twitter (ツイッター)Google+を始めました!ビジオに関するツイートを控えるようにします!約束です!(・∀・)

Qiqitori Crowdsourced Transcriptions

Hi, I am the owner of Qiqitori. I am pleased to announce the immediate launch of the Qiqitori transcription service. It might be slightly beta at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll get everything ironed out soon! We currently support English, German, and Japanese*, and we’re planning on adding many more languages!

Qiqitori is a transcription service specifically geared towards language learners. If you are studying a language and sometimes find yourself watching movies in the language you are studying and not understanding much of what people are saying, you have come to the right place! Extract the part you need a transcription for and get it transcribed on Qiqitori without having to bug your native acquaintances, for just €0.01 per second. Our transcribers are also more than happy to transcribe lectures or podcasts or whatever else you might have.

And the best part: you, too, can become a transcriber for Qiqitori and make some money on the side, just by taking a test! There’s no need to submit a CV or anything. Any native speaker who knows how to speel should be able to pass our tests!

* However, you cannot take Japanese tests at the moment, and parts of the Japanese UI might be slightly off!