It all started when I read the tweet from Troy Hunt (known for the Have I Been Pwned website) announcing his new video series on setting up HTTPS.
Just flagged all the videos on https://t.co/vyx7XUF5tT as Creative Commons – enjoy! https://t.co/4b0kIbr7Ms
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 28, 2018
In four short videos (around five minutes each), Hunt explains how you can add an SSL certificate to your website for free, using Cloudflare.
Here’s the first video in the series:
What Happened Next
I watched all four of the HTTPS is Easy videos.
They’re straightforward and Hunt’s explanations with screenshots makes it easy to understand what steps you need to take to add HTTPS to your site using Cloudflare.
Kudos to Hunt on publishing the videos, especially since he made them Creative Commons licensed.
I replied back to him on Twitter, thanking him for the helpful short videos.
Excellent! Thank you for these videos, Troy. I noticed captions haven’t been added to the videos, and autocaptions, are, um, not the best. If you turn on community contributions, I’d be happy to add captions to the videos. Here’s how https://t.co/DKi9hCxy15
— Deborah Edwards-Onoro (@redcrew) June 30, 2018
Hunt was open to the idea of getting the videos captioned.
He quickly enabled the option for community contributions for all the videos.
Let’s Add Captions!
I began work on creating the English captions for the first video. Overall, not a difficult task since it was a short video.
In addition, Hunt spoke clearly and slowly, making my job easier. I submitted my captions for approval (all video owners authorize adding community contributed captions and translations).
After he approved and published the captions for the first video, I started work on adding English captions to the second video in the four-part series.
Big shout-out to @redcrew who has gone and made a community contribution of captions to the first video in the HTTPS Is Easy series. I’ve just published her contribution, I hope it makes HTTPS more accessible than ever! https://t.co/lrQerPx3jZ
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 4, 2018
And that’s when the idea of community contributions for captions and translations took off.
The Community Gets Involved
People throughout the Twitter community jumped in to offer their help to translate the captions to other languages.
I just submitted a Swedish translation for review of the first video. Will continue working on the others asap.
— Ludwig Johnson (@ludwig_johnson) July 9, 2018
Started working on the Dutch translations last week, had to take the weekend off but I’ll finish them (first video) today.
— Tom Udding (@tomudding) July 9, 2018
Do you have a Spanish Translation? I can translate to Spanish if you want.
— Daniel Beato López (@dbeato) July 10, 2018
I’ve just submitted Indonesian for review. I use @AmaraSubs to meet subtitle standardization, words count per line for easy reading
— Dwi (@_dwirianto) July 9, 2018
Adding french captions ATM 🙂
— Calan (@Calan94) July 10, 2018
Ludwig Johnson, who added the Swedish captions for the first and second videos I captioned in English, noticed that the third and fourth videos didn’t have English captions yet.
So he added them.
Finished part 2 for Swedish as well. However, as I was going for part 3, there was no English CC. So I decided to make one. And one for part 4 as well. I hope it will help to make this great series of videos available in even more languages!
— Ludwig Johnson (@ludwig_johnson) July 9, 2018
It was so cool to read on Twitter how Hunt appreciated everyone’s help!
And how he encouraged others to contribute.
So impressed with the efforts of the community, we now have closed captions on my “HTTPS Is Easy” series in English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Czech, Polish and Indonesian. Sensational effort! https://t.co/NEnVyhx4Yb
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 10, 2018
You might be wondering why HTTPS on your website is important. Read on.
Why You Should Care about HTTPS
A secure connection using HTTPS helps protect website visitors from content spoofing and content injection.
In others words, using HTTPS on your website is making the web safer for everyone.
With Chrome 68 planned for release this month (July 2018), all websites that don’t use an HTTPS connection will display a warning in the browser that the connection is not secure.
Website owners who haven’t already taken the steps to add and configure an SSL certificate for their site are now faced with making their site secure.
And they need to do it quickly, before their site displays with the “not safe“ message in the browser address bar.
Thanks for the Help
Hunt’s videos on getting HTTPS set up on a website are timely and exactly what many website owners need.
What fun to kick off getting captions and translations rolling on such a useful video series!
Oooh, so glad to see all the other languages. And I see someone has already added captions for part 3 and 4. Glad to have been a part of this and to get it started!
— Deborah Edwards-Onoro (@redcrew) July 12, 2018
Hunt sent me a thank you for my help in getting it all started.
Yep, you rock, thanks for kicking it off!
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 12, 2018
My pleasure! I was happy to help others learn how they can make community contributions to YouTube videos.
(As of September 28, 2020, YouTube removed the community contributions feature)
