redone MBTA website

[xxv.livejournal.com]

For those who didn't get the email, the MBTA has completely redone their website. Despite some funky looking squished graphics on my laptop, I'd consider it a big improvement. I greatly enjoy the interactive maps, complete with bus routes and planned trips shown on the map. Check it out!

Comments

[ron_newman]

If I try to use the commerce section, the browsers all complain about invalid certificates and ask if I should trust them anyway. I always say yes, because I don't understand what any of that means.

[xxv.livejournal.com]

Huh. That's not very slick at all.

Certificates are documents that are issued by a trusted authority to websites that want to use encryption (that's "https://"). When the certificate is issued, it's "stamped" with the address of the website that is going to be using it - in this case, "commerce.mbta.com". Your web browser can detect if the certificate is genuinely issued from that authority and then compares the site that you go to with the one stored in the certificate.

The problem here is that the domain stamped into the certificate ("www.mbta.com") is not the one you went to ("commerce.mbta.com") and thus your browser complains.

They need to issue a new certificate with the proper domain in it for your browser to stop complaining.

[ron_newman]

In Opera and Firefox, the browser at least complained about the certificate. In Safari, I got no complaint, just a very bad-looking website that had no stylesheet (because the stylesheet was on the secure server with the bad certificate).