In a few weeks, Google Chrome will release version 61 of its web browser, which will flag all sites that have forms that load over an insecure HTTP connection as “Insecure” sites. What kind of site has a form and probably loads over HTTP, you ask? Nearly every library webpage ever! Luckily, Mary Morgan and I have been scrambling for the past month to make sure we’re ready when Chrome updates. (All of the other browsers will follow suit shortly, plus pover 60% of our users are on Chrome.) All of our online services (except for ScholarWorks, which is hosted and out of our control) not support HTTPS. Many also force HTTPS connections, but not all our services currently allow us to do that (*cough* Summon and The Catalog *cough*).
Last week we updated LibGuides, the Knowledge Base, and LibChat to all use HTTPS. Those were the final services to move over, but we now have another project to undertake: most of the images that LibGuides owners have added over the near decade that we’ve had LibGuides are set up to load over HTTP, which makes browsers unhappy (and is a security vulnerability). And so, we have to fix them. Tessa, our superstar student in System and Technology, will be helping me manually fix all the images on the 337 pages that have been identified as having problems. (Let’s be honest: she will fix most of them. Send her chocolate!)
Going forward, all images you add to your site, including thumbnail images for books or links, must be loaded over HTTPS. There are two ways to do this:
https:” at the beginning, and see whether the image loads. If it does, great! You have a working HTTPS URL. If not, then go to step 2.//” with no http or https in front of it, but that’s fine. It will load with whatever protocol the page loads with, which will be HTTPS.)