The introduction of the LetsEncrypt free SSL certificate service has made making your site SSL only a much easier process than ever before. They've made it even easier by allowing automation around certificate setup and renewal. In this post to his site Niklas Keller shows you how to use a PHP implementation of a tool to setup/refresh your certificates automatically.

Let’s Encrypt, the free and automated CA, started late last year into their public beta. They offer a pretty comprehensive client to automate the process of getting SSL clients and installing them. It will soon be moved to a new home at EFF.

If you’re already using PHP and don’t need / want the automatic installation of your free certificates or don’t want to install Python, here’s a client for you. kelunik/acme-client is able to issue and renew certificates using your already running webserver (e.g. Nginx or Apache). It’s using the http-01 challenge to prove your domain ownership / control to Let’s Encrypt.

He shows how to use the client to set up a new LetsEncrypt account (if you don't already have one) and issue a certificate through a few command line calls. He then shows how to automate the process to check your certificate expiration and load the updated certificates. He also includes an example of the command to revoke a certificate, just in case.

This time last year, several members of the PHP (and wider) community wrote up blog posts titled "The Ideas of March". The idea was to blog about blogging and try to kickstart others and encourage them to get back on to blogging again. Here's a list of the people who have posted so far:

• Wez Furlong
• Lorna Mitchell
• Cal Evans
• Chris Cornutt
• Tom Mairs
• Jason Lotito
• Drew McLellan
• Sean Coates
• Chris Shiflett
• Joshua Thijssen
• Kevin Bruce
• Cameron Moll
• Aaron Pinero
• Nick Sloan
• Rafael Dohms
• Bart-Jan Verhoef
• Michiel Rook
• Web Standardistias
• Joshua Taylor
• Katy Watkins
• Shane Carmody
• Rachel Shillcock
• Rian van der Merwe
• Praveen Kumar
• James Trevor

This list will be updated throughout the day as more posts show up. Have a post you don't see mentioned here? Let me know!

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part seven of their series covering the development of an Ajax chat application. This time,. they're focusing on some of the final touches - usability improvements.

To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.

They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part seven of their series covering the development of an Ajax chat application. This time,. they're focusing on some of the final touches - usability improvements.

To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.

They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.