Fixing the HTTPS on a Knight Lab TimelineJS instance

By Sherwin Arnott Art & Design
A ladybug crawls slowly along a leaf: encryption bugs.

I love perusing the Knight Lab tools now and then.1

Last year I used TimelineJS to create a nice interactive timeline of some misogynist tweets by Colby Cosh.2 3

I embedded the timeline in an article about misogyny among Canadian journalists. After I published, we added HTTPS to our website. But the encryption, and the green lock, wasn’t quite working properly on the Colby Cosh article. I tried to trouble shoot it a couple times. And I think Knight Labs has made some some improvements including better support for HTTPS since then.

But our HTTPS was just not quite working on that article and that’s been annoying as heck, but I kept putting off fixing it.

All of that to say, last weekend I decided to take a closer look and I realized it wasn’t a TimelineJS problem.

I forgot to review the URL references that formed the inputs of my TimelineJS instance. I had used HTTP references for some of the images. So I updated those URLS with the HTTPS references.

And now the encryption works fine on our article.

Unfortunately, the encryption appears to be broken on the Knight Lab webpage itself: https://timeline.knightlab.com/. I’ll see if I can find a way to alert them. Fixed!

  1. They prototype and design tools that other folks can use for their journalistic enterprises: https://knightlab.northwestern.edu ↩
  2. “That time Colby Cosh called Stephen Marche a cunt“. You can see the timeline, by itself, here. ↩
  3. Aside: I hope that Cosh’s publisher, Postmedia, doesn’t get any of our tax money to keep their shitty newspaper afloat. ↩