How to auto-renew a Let's Encrypt certificate (and get notifications about it)
Let’s Encrypt was still in beta when I started Podrover so I preferred to avoid any risk. Now I am building Affiliator and Let’s Encrypt is not in beta anymore. Plus I like the “always be learning” spirit, so I gave it a shot. I didn’t pick it because it’s free. I am not a fan of free. The beauty of Let’s Encrypt is that it comes as a binary program that you can run in the shell.
Adventures with SSL
Google is pushing it. It began two years ago at Google I/O. Not only all their services support SSL by default, but they will “penalize” websites not running SSL soon. There’s a pretty controversial post by Dave Winer about why Google is enforcing SSL. I’ll be way less controversial and more pragmatic. SSL is good, the intentions of people installing it are (probably) good. Security is important, but doesn’t come without overhead.