I recently got this email about my project The Whale:

I am not a web developer or anything like that, but I am a person who has struggled with OCD and dyslexia for decades. A work like Moby Dick is normally not accessible to me because of the way I read. Your way of organizing it into small bitesize, all caps chunks has allowed me to enjoy this great literary work.

I know this is probably not what you had in mind when you wrote the code, but I wanted to thank you all the same.

I was floored. This is the most rewarding kind of feedback to get about a project.

And while that’s certainly not what I had in mind when I wrote the code, there is a part of me that enjoys the constant fidgeting with the text. All the clicking (or tapping) eases some part of my brain that might otherwise have me go impulsively check for new social media notifications.

I asked if there were any other texts that he might enjoy in this format, and then decided to generalize my project to show additional novels beyond Moby Dick. And so was born the project I’m now calling Linky. The current selection includes:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
• A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Update: Added three more titles to the list.

If you have any ideas for other titles that might benefit from the Linky treatment, please let me know.

Update: since this was written, the letsencrypt-auto script has improved significantly. When I tried it again today (December 8, 2015), the process was basically just cloning the GitHub repo and running ./letsencrypt-auto. I’ll leave the original (outdated) information here for posterity.

As of today phiffer.org is being served using SSL encryption thanks to a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt. It’s a recently launched service, sponsored by Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (among others), intended to make HTTPS encryption ubiquitous on the web.

Let’s Encrypt is very new, and there are still some rough edges, but overall I’m impressed by how smoothly the process went. I wanted to document my experience, in case it’s helpful to others (and future-me). This post is a bit more technical than usual and, because the service is new, much of it may not be relevant very long into the future. That said, I hope this might offer some clues for folks trying to get up and running on HTTPS.

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I have some resolutions for the new year. By posting them onto a public weblog I believe they become officially binding.

1. Write more, and read more to improve my writing.
2. Live more in each moment. To that end, be more aware of how my time is spent.
3. No new projects. Focus instead on fixing and improving things I’ve already begun.

In 2014 Ellie and I exchanged resolutions. Three times a week we each have our respective tasks: I have a regimen of stretches and exercises, and she is supposed to meditate for 5 minutes. We began last January and have been offering each other reminders when we forget to keep up.

My exercises—along the lines of Pilates or Yoga—feel part of my routine now. It seems that one has stuck, and now the resolution has become unnecessary. That ought to be a meta-resolution each year.

Ellie also does her own stretches and exercises, but doesn’t need the same spousal nudge to keep up with her routine. For the sake of balance, I’ll throw in a bonus fourth 2015 resolution: also make time for meditation.