April 3, 2023
I'd been having trouble getting my web site "verified" on Mastodon. When you save a URL in your profile on a Mastodon site, it'll go to that site and look for a link with the rel="me" attribute that points to your Mastodon profile. But for some reason this site, http://jasonfleshman.org, never worked.
Then someone randomly retweeted the Mastodon promotional account, which was chiming on on the Twitter Blue/Verified idiocy that the Melon Husk had kicked off. And I asked them, what's up with my site not verifying?
Turns out only HTTPS sites get verified. I'm not sure why that is, someone can take control of my site with the same level of difficulty regardless of whether it's served over TLS. But whatever, I knew why it was happening.
And it turns out my host has a Let's Encrypt option right there in the dashboard. Sweet. I turned it on, and all the automated things did their thing.
So now my site has TLS. Both on the "main" .org site and on the alternate .net site that is its twin. All so I could get a checkbox on a social media site that nobody uses.
