Tasha's (aka Beren) Journal

So Google are planning to implement a strategy that down rates your website in their searches and marks it unsafe if it isn't HTTPS, i.e. uses SSL so it is secure when talking to your browser.

In some ways this is good, in many, many ways, very, very bad. You should hear what some of my network and security expert friends have to say about it. There are so many problems with this when it comes to legacy systems.

Now really the only thing I can think of that needs to be secure on WittegenPress.com is possibly the comments section, but thanks to Google I now have to change over anyway. Luckily a company called Let's Encrypt are giving out free SSL certificates and Dreamhost have signed up to their scheme so they will automatically put one on your domain if you ask them to, making it much easier than it used to be. We used to have to pay for one if we wanted it to work without showing messages about the SSL certificate being self-signed, which is why we've never done anything about it before.

Still, changing over is a royal pain. Getting the host to use HTTPS is easy - I just change the base URL of the WordPress site, but now I am having to trawl through the whole site checking for mixed content. For those not in the know that means plugins or images that are being served over HTTP because they were put in with full URLs.

Our book table plugin is already showing a bug where some of the content is blocked thanks to the fact they didn't think of this. So we are waiting for them to fix it. It will be in the next update thank heavens. Still means I have to go through every single book and edit it - so not what I wanted to be doing today.

Thank you for listening to me rant, this post has been brought to you by the letters HTTPS and the number billion (as in the number of links I have to change). :P

For anyone interested I used this post to help me switch over: 
https://css-tricks.com/moving-to-https-on-wordpress/

I distribute my books via Smashwords and I thought several of them must have been simply refused by Nook UK because they didn't show up when I searched for my name. It turns out they are there, they just don't show up in searches.

It mostly seems to be my adult titles, but there are a couple of others that are simply not there. I have no idea why, but the only way I found them was by translating the B&N url into the Nook UK format. We link to Nook UK from Wittegen Press when we can so that Nook users can easily find our books. For my reference and for anyone else having the same trouble I thought I'd document how to do it.

Here is a B&N url for my latest book Cat's Confidence (it's on both sites which is what made it easy to use).:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cats-confidence-natasha-duncan-drake/1116968975?ean=2940045280310

here is the Nook UK URL:
http://uk.nook.com/ebooks/cats-confidence-by-natasha-duncan-drake/2940045280310

So to translate one to the other you have to do the following three things:

• Replace www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ from the B&N URL with uk.nook.com/ebooks/
• Add a by- before the author's name
• remove the first number and ?ean= (e.g 1116968975?ean=) from the last part of the URL

That then gives you the correct URL on Nook UK for your ebook that is on Barnes and Noble. It doesn't seem to work with big name books because they have different ref numbers, but they'll show up in searches anyway.