Welcome to Tom SSL

I've been meaning to do this for a long time.

I've been writing software for about thirty years (since I was a young child) and doing it as a full-time job since 2001. Over the years I've nearly started a technical blog lots of times, but have never quite got around to it. About a week ago I decided that 2014 was going to be different, so here it is with less than an hour to spare.

Since I gave myself such a tight deadline there wasn't time to write a ridiculously over-specified blogging engine from scratch, so I had a look around and decided to use Ghost. Initially I was going to use their hosted service, but they don't yet have full SSL support and that was one of my requirements (as you can probably tell from the title, my main focus is going to be on security).

I had a look at making it work using Azure as a reverse proxy, but that's a subject for another day. Instead I decided to go down the self-hosted route using Azure websites and again there were a few issues since I wanted to enforce SSL. I'll be writing a post about this process in the next few days.

In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2015.

Happy New Year :-)