Monday February 9, 2026; 3:53 PM EST
- On January 30 my ability to update this site broke. Each time that I tried to build this blog I saw an error message reporting that the file name contains illegal characters. I also observed via the web browser console that the server was returning a 400 error. I suspected the use of my email address with the at sign was the cause, even though the at sign is a legal character I saw information on the web saying it was common for web servers to have policies that don't recognize the at sign as a legal character.#
- Today Dave wrote on Scripting.com that there was a problem in Drummer blogs due it now being served by HTTPS. Details suggesting a fix were posted on the drummerCms github repo that involved creating one's own template for the site and adding an OPML header to tell the CMS to use it for generating she site. I then went down the rabbit hole of fixing the site and I posted the results of my work to the thread on github. #
- I was curious about how support for https caused the illegal characters, so before I did anything I decided to just try building the blog and to my surprise it worked. My idea is that https support has been added to the oldschool host using either Caddy or Nginx, which had a default policy that did not allow the at sign in the URL and that subsequently got changed so site access will work. If I am right the net is Drummer users don't have to actually do the template change unless Dave were to decide to force all access via https.#
- I decided to press on down the rabbit hole by getting a copy of the minimal template Dave provides, editing it, and storing it on my shared Internet instance. My copy of a working template is at https://shared.frankmcpherson.net/html/newtemplate.html. Users could use this link but that means any changes I might make to the template in the future will affect your site. #
- To use the new template one has to add the OPML header urlTemplate to the blog.opml file by selecting File, Edit OPML headers in Drummer. Through several iterations of testing I found that all references to //scripting.com in the template needed to change to //s3.amazonaws.com/scripting.com and all references to //fargo.io need to be changed to //s3.amazonaws.com/fargo.io. The changes are needed for HTTPS access because all referenced scripts and CSS files need to use HTTPS, which with these changes are provided by Amazon's default public access to S3 buckets. (s3.amazonaws.com is Amazon's host). #
- After adding the urlTemplate header variable and setting it to a value, which is the URL to your template file, click Tools, Build my blog in Drummer to build the new site. Note that when you Build your blog with Drummer it may continue loading the site using HTTP rather than HTTPS, pay attention to the security indicator in your blog. You may want to confirm HTTPS by access the site via another browser tab.#
- After testing further I found that all the generated links in the site, for example the links to each day's posts, where still using HTTP rather than HTTPS. I went back to the Drummer docs and found information about using PagePark for serving Drummer blogs with one's own URL like www.example.com, and that requires the header variable urlBlogWebsite set to the URL https://www.example.com. I added urlBlogWebsite and set it to https://oldschool.scripting.com/frank.mcpherson@gmail.com and then rebuilt the blog and confirmed that all generated URLs used HTTPS. #