Lessons Learned in December 2016

This is what I learned in December 2016:

At the end of the year, I had to use some of my vacation days. That bought me time to do some of those projects that lay around for months. One of them was the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. The final goal is to upgrade all of my five homepages (for friends and family, hacktalk.de and of course stevenschwenke.de). There will be an article for what I decided and why during this upgrade later. However, one of the tasks was to use TLS for all of those sites. I thought that I needed Drupal 8 for some reason. However, I noticed that my host all-inkl.com has a very easy integration for letsencrypt.org. Basically, you just have to click a checkbox to agree on the terms of letsencrypt.org. The automatically created certificate is installed and can be used a couple of minutes later. To make it complete, there’s even an option to force TLS. If you enable it, all requests to the http-version of a page will be forwarded to the https-version. Very nice!
After having set up the new Drupal 8 installation for hacktalk.de, I wanted unregistered users to not be able to create new accounts. Googling that brought the solution: Configuration -> Account settings -> Settings -> Registration and Cancellation.
Finally, I published an article about my Writing awesome Java code workshop.