Website kerfuffle, Part 1
I knew that eventually my websites would need a serious look.
Cycletrailsaustralia.com was launched in June 2010 and has had only a few technical tweaks subsequently. There was a conversion to HTTPS, which took some effort as the website had many sections and over 900 pages.
It should’ve been converted to Mobile First, but I’ve never got around to it, and have been concentrating on tramping.net.nz for the most part.
Other websites work well enough on small screens, but they are just a few pages long, and don’t have the complicated menus of a huge website.
So, there have been four major disruptions over the last 16 years.
1. 2016 | Mobile First. Accommodating each website to a phone-sized screen. Man, dealing with those large menus was a task. Probably not fully optimised yet.
2. 2017 | HTTP to HTTPS. This involves the encrypted transfer of web information. This might have been the easiest change, and it required ferreting out all links to other websites to ensure they were from HTTPS sites.
3. 2017 | Security certificates. Initially, these only needed to be updated every two years, but had to be installed manually. That was a pain, but not as much as when they doubled the frustration by reducing the time to just one year. My certificates required the work in December, when I was often out in the hills and not set up with my big screens that help me make the manual changes. This is slowly moving to needing securities certificates changed each month.
4. 2026 | PHP 8.1 update. Currently running on a PHP 7.1 server that discontinued security updates 9 years ago. This is to be done in the next few weeks.
Website backend work is one of the most stress-inducing activities that I engage in these days. Not looking forward to it.
Man, old man.