I have finally gotten around to installing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates on all the websites I run. I use WebFaction (affiliate link) for my web hosting and that meant I had use their API for installing certificates. Rather than just placing the certificate files directly on the server I had to use their XML-RPC API to install the certificate. I quickly discovered the letsencrypt-webfaction gem which makes the process of obtaining and installing certificates on WebFaction easy. In this blog post I’ll explain what I did to get everything installed and configured.

I typically like to do development work on my local machine. Locally I’ve got all my favorite tools, scripts, and aliases along with custom mappings for my editor. Local development is much more pleasant than SSH’ing into a server and running commands. Without all my custom tools and configurations the environment feels foreign to me. Because of this I generally try to avoid solutions to development problems that involve a virtual machine. Even though the VM is running on my laptop it’s really not that much easier to develop on than a regular server.

I recently have been trying to automate many of the smaller tasks that I need to perform when publishing a blog post. One those tasks is submitting my new sitemap to the various search engines and blogging services. Right now I either do it manually or wait until the search engines crawl my site again.