Free SSL For Hostgator Customers

Internet, Technology, , ,

Following recent announcements by Google, some Hostgator customers may have received an email telling them that they could get a free SSL Certificate for their websites (although I was not one of them!).

Activate Free SSL on WordPress

I thought it would be useful to show how this free SSL certificate could be activated on your WordPress sites on Hostgator in case anyone was not aware of this offering.

But first a small amount of background. For the last couple of years Google has been saying that it will highlight sites that do not have an SSL certificate by flagging up a message on Google Chrome to say that your site is insecure if you do not have a certificate on it.

This has led to some people clicking away from sites that say this under the impression that their details may be stolen etc of they continue which is obviously a bad thing for website owners.

Google Announcement

In February 2018 they made this announcement that from 1st July 2018 this would happen to all sites, thus making it pretty important to have the SSL certificate installed from tomorrow.

However, up until then, only business customers could have a free SSL for their websites on Hostgator and anyone else had to pay from $39 upwards to buy a certificate via Hostgator.

Hostgator Announcement

On 31st May Hostgator posted this on their blog which said that there would be a free SSL for Hostgator customers for their sites.

The blog post did not go into much detail about how to activate the free SSL certificate which is also available to those on shared hosting and reseller plans so if you are wondering if this applies to you, try the following:

Check Your Site

Firstly, to check that your site has the certificate, type in https in front of your website URL. You can see if the site will load over https as well as http.

If it does then you will need to force the site to use https by using an SSL Plugin. The most popular one to use is ‘Really Simple SSL’ which does what it says on the tin. Check it out in the plugin directory:

Obviously, before you make any major changes to your site you should take a back up.

really simple ssl

How to Activate Free Hostgator SSL

Click on ‘Install Now’ and then ‘Activate’

You may be lucky and the Plugin activates automatically with no issues or you may have to go through a couple of other steps (our sites varied even though they are all on the same server).

You may get the message ‘Detected possible certificate issues’ if the SSL certificate fails to activate:

detected possible certificate issues ssl

If this is the case then click on ‘Reload over https’ – you will likely have to logon again to your website.

If you repeatedly get issues with this not working just keep trying! Try loading the site with https before clicking, or if possible logon as another admin user. Otherwise close your browser and try again and it should work eventually.

Once this works you should get this message:

almost ready to migrate to SSL

or you may bypass the first error message and get this one straight away. If so, click on ‘Go ahead, activate SSL!’

You should be all set to go and your site will default to your free SSL certificate when you load it.

Downloadable Printable UK TV Schedule – World Cup 2018

Fun Stuff, Sports

So the World Cup 2018 has started and there are games on every day and it can be a bit difficult to keep track of. Obviously you will know when your own team are playing but you might want to watch out for other teams too.

So if you are looking for a printable UK TV schedule for the World Cup so that you can keep something with you to hand to refer to and know when all the games are on then we have one here for you.

Yes you can go all techno and get the official app but sometimes it just makes things easier to look at the whole schedule on a piece (or 3 in this case) of paper.

So here is the schedule, showing what date and time the matches are on, together with whether they are on BBC or ITV and with a space for you to complete the scores.

We will update this as we go along with the relevant teams showing in the quarter finals, semi finals etc so if you want to you can come back and print page 3 again once these things have been decided.

Download the printed World Cup 2018 schedule of games here. The format is a 1 page Word document (updated for the last 16).

Kindle Fire Kids Volume Stuck on Mute

Children, Entertainment, Technology, ,

Recently we had an issue in our house where my son’s Kindle Fire was stuck on mute and I couldn’t get the volume back up whatever I tried. He, funnily enough was happy to watch his Fire with no volume! I guess it was better than nothing.

It is the kids Fire with the sturdy blue cover that it happened to but I guess maybe it could happen to other Fires too if they work the same way.

I dragged down the settings from the top and sure enough the mute button was on, so I tried dragging the volume slider and it dragged fine but still the mute button was on. I tried holding the mute button to turn it off but that also had no effect.

Even the volume buttons on the side of the Fire did not make any difference, the volume was still off.

I couldn’t figure out what my son had done to turn off the volume and I couldn’t find any answers online. I did find something talking about some settings that may have caused it but I couldn’t find what they were talking about.

Anyway, I found an answer (it is not ideal but it works so I guess it is an answer), and it was the age old answer where technology was concerned, a hard reboot. I turned the Fire off by holding down the power button until it asked if I wanted to turn it off and then turned it back on again by holding the button again and sure enough when I tried it again the volume was back on again.

no volume on kindle fire
Eventually I managed to unmute the Fire!

I have had the problem of no sound on the Fire a couple of times now. I can only assume that my son presses something somewhere along the line to do this. It doesn’t seem to be a simple mute as this should then come back on again when you unmute it, but it doesn’t.

Oh well, at least there is a solution that will not drive me completely crazy!

Update: We now have a new Fire and the same thing happens with this too. Apparently there may be a certain app that causes this issue but I don’t know which one so that doesn’t really help! In any case the reboot does still work and the mute problem does not happen so much that this gets annoying.

 

How to Swallow Pills

Food & Drink, Health
How to swallow pills
Some pills (if not all!) can be hard to swallow!

If you are like me and have a really bad gag reflex and don’t know how to swallow pills without retching and bringing the thing back up (assuming it actually gets anywhere in the first place beyond your tongue) then it seems like we are not alone!

Many people struggle to swallow pills, even if they are smaller than what seems like normal bite sized pieces of food. Even to myself I think it must be some kind of psychological thing together with the gag reflex as a lot of the pills we have to swallow are not really that big in theory.

Anyway, I have found a way to swallow pills that works for me in most cases (I still struggle with the really big capsules).

What you need to do is to take a chunk of biscuit/cookie (you can use many other foodstuffs but I find biscuits/cookies are the best and also easiest just to grab on the go) and chew it up to the point where you are almost ready to swallow it. Keep it maybe a little bit more chunky than you otherwise might do before swallowing.

Once you are just about to swallow the biscuit/cookie, pop the pill in your mouth among the biscuit bits and swallow the whole lot together. If you have a pill that will break into 2 then if might be worth doing it in 2 goes. It may be harder to do with those big plastic capsules but for others it should be OK.

I have to say this works for me 90% of the time and I am one of the worst for taking tablets and pills. I hope that it works for you but I guess it is not going to work for everyone.

Give it a try and let me know if it does work!

Make Your Own Very Hungry Caterpillar

Arts & Humanities, Children, Fun Stuff, Recreation,

Here is a fun craft activity to do with the kids – how to make your own very hungry caterpillar. This could be an activity for your own kids or something you can do in batches for a group of children, e.g at a playgroup or preschool.

The result is this, the caterpillar before he ate through all that food and got a tummy ache!

Instructions

What you will need:
  • green card (or paper or can be white)
  • red paper (again can be white)
  • white card
  • sticky eyes (optional)
  • lolly stick (optional)
  • green paint
  • yellow paint
  • glue stick
  • sellotape

Firstly paint your green card or paper with a very rough mix of dark green and yellow paint. Make sure the colours don’t blend together too well!

Mark up the back of the card with discs. If you are just doing one or two you can obviously make them much bigger.

Cut them out so that they all have slightly differing colours in them.

Cut a body shape out of white card and a head out of the red paper. if you don’t have red paper colour in some white paper with a red pen!

Use a glue stick to start gluing down the body pieces one at a time, overlapping each other onto the card body.

Stick on the head and then you can either use sticky eyes or else just draw on your own eyes (the rights colours are green in the middle and yellow outside but sticky eyes do just fine). Draw in his mouth with a marker or felt pen.

You can then use sellotape to attach the lolly stick to the back of the head so that you can move the caterpillar around – ideal to use with the story book.

And there you go, the finished hungry caterpillar:

How to make your own very hungry caterpillar

 

And if you want to buy the book…