I don’t know how many people will see this post, since the ones who need it are those who right now aren’t able to access the main site, but here it goes:

I made a bad mistake when I renewed the certificate and chose to replace the old cert with an ECDSA one, which meant generating a new key… but I had configured the site with public key pinning, which meant that browsers would cache the old key’s pin for at least 2 months. I should have generated the new key 2 months before, and added its pin as a backup key to the server, so browsers would cache and know about it in time, when the main pinned key stopped matching the site’s. New visitors are OK, returning visitors are getting that error. 🙁

Anyway, this guide shows how to manually delete HSTS (which pinning is a part of) cache entries from Firefox and Chrome, which will make your browser “forget” about the key pinning and be able to access FNG again. You only have to do it once (for any browser that’s accessed the site in the past 2 months). You should delete any keys for “www.fantasynamegen.com” and “fantasynamegen.com”.

Sorry about this… 🙁

As you may have guessed, this is the companion blog for my Fantasy Name Generator (FNG) site, existing since 2009, though it was based in part on a utility I coded for fun (and to generate names for AD&D characters back in the day) on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, in BASIC, in the late 80s.

Why does a name generator even need a blog, you may ask? Well, technically it doesn’t (and it’s thrived perfectly well for 3 years without one). This blog will have mostly just two goals: posting about improvements and new features, and getting (and replying to) user suggestions. Which means that it’s not intended to be a high traffic blog, or a frequently updated one (as I work on the site mostly during my free time). I’m also thinking of, from time to time, doing a post with funny generated names / examples.

So… any suggestions? “Better names” is too vague. 🙂 The ability to generate names for other fantasy races / universes would be a good suggestion. Or some idea that would improve the generation of names of a particular type. Or user interface improvements. Or something else you can think of.

Also, there’s a Portuguese language counterpart of FNG, called Gerador de Nomes de Fantasia (yes, I’m Portuguese). It is mostly the same, but doesn’t include some name types that really only make sense in the English language. On the other hand, it can generate Portuguese name/surname combinations.