{"id":4809,"date":"2016-10-20T12:21:35","date_gmt":"2016-10-20T17:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.highedwebtech.com\/?p=4809"},"modified":"2016-10-20T12:21:35","modified_gmt":"2016-10-20T17:21:35","slug":"highedweb-http2-letsencrypt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highedwebtech.com\/2016\/10\/20\/highedweb-http2-letsencrypt\/","title":{"rendered":"Speed and Security: My talk at HighEdWeb 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I had the privilege of speaking at HighEdWeb 2016<\/a>, held in Memphis, Tennessee. As usual, it was a great conference full of informative sessions and even better people. For me, that’s really the highlight – seeing people I’ve known for years, sharing our successes, our struggles, and a drink. Or three.<\/p>\n

This year, I talked about the new HTTP\/2 protocol. Modern browsers require HTTP\/2 to be served over TLS, so an SSL certificate is needed. While many of our .edu sites have SSL certificates, they can be a pain to install on other servers, test sites, and other projects we work on. I walked through installing Let’s Encrypt certificates. <\/p>\n

Here’s the excerpt of the session:<\/p>\n

When it comes to web pages, speed is always important. Users leave if a site takes too long. Google ranks faster sites better. Our browsers, computers, and smartphones have all evolved, but HTTP\/1.1 was last updated in 1999. In internet years, that’s 5 lifetimes ago. Now, HTTP\/2 has emerged as a modern update for serving content to users, quickly and securely. In this session, we will discuss HTTP\/2, its improvements, challenges, and opportunities for web developers in higher ed. This speed comes at a cost – HTTP\/2 is, for now, only servable via HTTPS, so we will explore easy SSL generation with Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority offering free SSL certificates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can view a PDF of my slide deck<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"HighedwebIn my nearly 20 years of working in higher ed, I’ve been fortunate to have given dozens of conference presentations, but this year’s HighEdWeb presentation broke new ground for me. I’ve sat in many technical presentations where the presenter showed their tech, or their code, but not too many where some of the work was done live at the podium. <\/p>\n

So I challenged myself – I thought what better way is there to show how easy it is to install a Let’s Encrypt certificate, so I took a big risk and did it live, in real time, on a real site, in front of 60 people. <\/p>\n

I practiced many times, and most times it worked, other times the process was full of errors. On Tuesday, however, it went flawlessly and I generated and installed an SSL certificate successfully. Man, what a huge relief. <\/p>\n

The Twitter backchannel was great:<\/p>\n

\n

Whoa. @mrichwalsky<\/a> is about to create and install an SSL cert live in #dpa12<\/a>. RESPECT. \u270a\u2764\ufe0f #heweb16<\/a><\/p>\n

— Sven Aas (@SvenAas) October 18, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n