Uncle’s Diary · Learn AI Simply · 3 minutes · Nothing to install, nothing to learn
I left a comment under someone else’s video. At the end I mentioned where to find me: justaskboomer.com.
Then I clicked my own link.
A new tab opened, and my browser told me my site does not support a secure connection.
My website was eight days old. That comment was the first time I’d ever sent a stranger to it. I had about four minutes of quiet panic.
What I did instead
I asked.
I copied the error message out word for word and said: here’s what happened.
The AI checked my address — both versions, with and without the “www” — and the security certificate on each. Everything came back clean. The site was up.
Then it asked me one question.
“When you typed the address into that comment — did you put https:// in front of it, or just the plain address?”
Just the plain address. The way you’d say it out loud.
Eight characters
There are two doors into every website. An old one that doesn’t lock, and a new one that does.
Writing https:// in front is how you say “use the locking door.”
Leave it off, and something further down the line has to guess. It guessed the old door. My browser refused to walk through it and said so.
The warning was never about my website. It was about my link.
Then I fixed it, and made it worse
I opened the comment, added the eight characters, hit enter.
The comment disappeared.
I was told this was probably a spam filter — that turning plain words into a real link makes a comment look like advertising, and it was likely sitting in a queue waiting for the channel owner.
That was labelled a guess. So I checked it: opened the video signed out, and looked.
It isn’t in a queue. It’s gone.
So the guess was wrong. I know that because checking cost me one minute.
🐾 Boomer here. To summarise: my Uncle was defeated by a piece of punctuation, repaired the punctuation, and was then defeated by a robot who found the repair suspicious. In his defence, he was the only person in this entire story who thought to check anything at all.
The honest ledger
The point of this site is that people like me can do this. So here’s exactly who did what.
What I did:
Posted the comment. Clicked my own link. Copied the error out exactly. Asked. Went and checked, signed out, when I was told to.
What was done for me:
Tested both addresses and both certificates. Ruled out the frightening explanations first. Found the eight characters. Told me which part of the answer was documented and which part was a guess — and the guess is the part that turned out wrong.
The actual lesson
You don’t have to know whether it’s broken.
You only have to know how to check.
Twice in one afternoon I couldn’t tell a disaster from a nothing. A dead website or eight missing characters. A deleted comment or one waiting in a queue.
From where I sat, each pair looked identical.
Both times, finding out took about a minute.
What to do with this
Where you own the page, write the full address. Your site, your channel’s About page, video descriptions, email signature. https:// and all.
Where you’re a guest, write the plain name. Comment sections, forums. Just justaskboomer.com — not a link. It reads fine, it doesn’t trip spam filters, and anyone who types it into their browser arrives safely anyway.
Click your own links. Once, signed out, ideally on a different device. It’s the only way to see what a stranger sees.
And when you hit a wall you don’t understand, paste this in:
“Here’s what happened: [paste the message exactly as it appeared]. Please check whether anything is actually broken before we assume it is — plainly, I don’t know the jargon. And if there’s any part of this you can’t see or verify, say so instead of guessing.”
That last sentence is the one that earned its keep today.
My site was up the whole time. I’d just handed out the wrong key.
Checked 29 July 2026: both versions of my address served correctly with a valid certificate — measured, not assumed. The comment is confirmed gone, not held; exactly why, I don’t know, and I’ve left the wrong guess in rather than quietly deleting it. Platforms change these rules often, so yours may behave differently than mine did.
More from Uncle’s Diary — and the 9-lesson beginner series — at Learn AI Simply.