Instagram, Gramblr, SSL and all that stuff ....

The summer is still going strong here, and I'm so enjoying walking around barefoot and never being cold. It's my favorite season. Although I admit it wouldn't be bad if it rained a bit, the water supply is dwindling, and the plants in our garden are starting to look a bit crispy ...

I had to do my taxes this week, so I didn't have much art time. I did do a new map face though:

as well as an ink drawing :-)

Last week I got some questions from people who also want to use Instagram through their computer. I was happy to be able to tell them about Gramblr, a program that you can download to your computer and that makes it very easy to upload from your computer instead of using your phone. I had bought a little book: Instagram for dummies, and they advised using this program. I had been using it without any problems for more than a week.

However, Katie warned me that she got hacked when using Gramblr, and that Instagram doesn't like it at all when you use it, and if they discover you upload from your computer they can close your account. Also, she couldn't get to my blog anymore, she got a big scary warning saying "this site is not secure". I can tell you I was a bit spooked by this. Was this caused by Gramblr or was something else going on?

So I did a little research and thought I'd share it here on the blog.

First of all: the problem with my blog (the scary warning) had nothing to do with Gramblr. That being said, I did some googling about Gramblr, and some people have been using it for years without any problems, others have been hacked or got their account closed down. It might have something to do with a question you get at the end: when you've uploaded your picture and you send it to Instagram, they ask you whether you want free likes. I always click no, and I haven't had any problems. A lot of people got into trouble when they said yes. It seems most of these problems happened a few years ago though, at least the ones I found.

Anyway, I've been looking at other ways to use the pictures on my computer, and now I usually use Google photos. If you have a google-account, you also have a photo-folder, and you can upload your pictures to that folder and access it via your phone. It's a bit of a drag to have to do it like that, because Gramblr is so user-friendly, but for now I'll just be a bit careful. Wouldn't want my new account getting closed down ... :-/

Then the other problem: the scary warning "this site is not secure". It has to do with SSL-certificates. I'm by no means an expert, so I won't go into the technical details, but I discovered when I clicked on my blog, next to the web-address in the upper part of the screen, it had a small circle with an i in it (this is on Chrome, maybe in other browsers it looks different). When I clicked on the i, it said the connection was not secure. So I started looking at all of my other sites, and all of them except for my blog and my website, had a little black padlock next to the www.address. That means it's an https-site so it's secure. I had no idea why my blog didn't have that. So I looked at a few blogs of Paint Party Friday, and discovered some of them had the little i in the circle, and some had the padlock.

I spent a whole evening searching for a solution, and I'm happy I found it :-) When you have a Blogger-blog, you just need to go to dashboard - settings - basic - and click yes where it asks if you want https. Go back to the homepage and see the magic little padlock :-)

My website was harder. I have a free website with Weebly, but with my own domain-name. You have to go to settings - general - SSL - enable. But with my website it didn't say " enable", it only said "update", which meant I would have to pay. But I was reading everywhere that it was free for all plans. So I sent them an email and they fixed it. But because I had my own domain-name, I needed to do an extra step with my registrar (it's all explained on the site when you try to enable SSL). That took about 48 hours, but now my website is also secure :-)

Well, that was a bit of a long explanation, but I figured more people might have a problem with this, so you can spare yourself the time to figure out how to solve it :-) I hope you understand my explanation, if you have any questions just ask!

Okay, high time for my weekly funnies and thinkies!

I love the man in the back smiling ...

Did you know this weekend there's a creative retreat, with 18 lessons, completely free!? You can register here! I hope I'll have time to do some lessons!

Well, thanks so much for paying me a visit! I wish you a lovely day, and of course a weekend full of paint and creativity! Have fun! I'll be back next week ♥ ♥ ♥