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Is this site worth developing / promoting or too niche? (fixssl.com)

6 points by diamondsea ↗ HN
I was tired of running into problems with encrypted pages not being able to show off-site content without giving IE Mixed Content warnings, so I threw this site together in few hours to get around it.

Do you think there's enough of a market to develop it, or just leave it as a hobby site?

(I already had all the servers and ecommerce stuff setup from other projects, so it was pretty easy to just put all the pieces together)

What say the hackers?

4 comments

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astrodust
Since an SSL cert costs about $20 a year, this would cost more. I don't see the point.

For $20 a month I can have my own VPS, my own IP, and my own certificate and side-step all of this.

Perhaps this is to arbitrage against people not knowing any better, or not having the expertise to implement it properly. In any case, does seem to be a small market.

diamondsea
It's more for content you don't control that you want to include in a site. For example, if you want to show the CNN feed within a secure portal page, it will give you the mixed-content warning because of the images in the feed.

Running the RSS feed through FixSSL does some basic remapping of the links so that it routes the images through FixSSL, which prevents the mixed-content warnings from appearing.

Of course, if CNN (and other sites) offered HTTPS versions of their feeds, there would be no need for this, but until they do it serves a purpose.

mgkimsal
I think this is meant to deal with non-SSL content hosted outside of your own domain, right? As the earlier posted pointed out, you can just get an SSL cert and DIY much cheaper. If it's to deal with non-SSL content hosted by someone else, I'm assuming you're proxying the content?

Might you still get those errors anyway if some javascript on the page makes a request for non-SSL content?

diamondsea
Correct, it's for showing off-site content on your own secure pages, such as a portal site showing a photo-of-the-day from another site or an RSS feed containing images.

Yes, you could roll your own solution, but this is, well, easier and lots of non-programmer admins might have trouble with it. This is just a simple way to access that site without having to write or load scripts onto your server.

Right now, it's just a straight passthrough (GET/ECHO) of the requested URL, nothing fancy. If you request an HTML or RSS page it will try some basic munging of the content to change the non-SSL links to reroute them through the fixssl system. I could expand on those if there's any interest in the service.