What's New On These Pages: August 2024

I have some future plans for these pages, of course!

Thursday 22nd August
It looks like Cloudflare is aggressively caching images and since almost all the site (apart from form submissions) is static, there's little need for caching, so I've turned it off on Cloudflare for the lottery.merseyworld.com site.
Saturday 17th August
I never bothered with a secure certificate for this site in the three decades it's been running because there's no cookies, no logins and very little JavaScript. The only forms on the site are for submitting searches for winning numbers/prizes and generating Lucky Dip numbers.
However, apparently this non-personal info needs to be protected with encryption according to Google Chrome (which now displays a full page warning that a site is insecure if it only offers http) and shortly Mozilla Fireffox will also follow suit.
Hence, I have moved this site behind a Cloudflare free plan, which generates free Google Trust Services secure certs frequently. It means the new site URL is now https://lottery.merseyworld.com/ and requests to the insecure http version are redirected to the secure https version. It also means that the merseyworld.com DNS and the site itself are protected from DDoS attacks (but the site has never had one in the 30+ years of its existence).
I probably should have done this a lot earlier because apart from changing DNS servers and adding the merseyworld.com domain to my company's Cloudflare account, there was basically nothing tricky to do and zero ongoing costs.

Previous month: July 2024