Gobble Gobble, It's the Roundup!

News from November 2024

Wow, what a month. We're putting out the Roundup a week early to make room for Thanksgiving, but it's already stuffed! (Get it?) Now, no further messing around, let's dig in.

Announcements

Reclaim’s Rewind 2024: Join us for free events in December

Reclaim’s Rewind 2024 is a series of free events celebrating community, collaboration and our continued commitment to advocate for the open web in Higher Education and beyond. Next month we are taking to the airwaves, our social channels, community forums and video calls to look back at the best of 2024. Join us for activities highlighting the best bits from the past year, including case studies and lessons learned. It’s time to take a step back and reflect together on everything we have achieved in partnership with admin, faculty and students, to gather our strength and find some renewed inspiration before the new year starts. 

Let’s Rewind 2024 together as you tune in and join the conversation. Head over to the events calendar to register.

December Community Chat: Rewind 2024

December 18 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

For this final community chat of the year we are inviting ALL our special guests from 2024 to come together. You will hear updates of the exciting work happening across our community and have a chance to share your own highs and lows of 2024. This is our time to come together to say thank you and acknowledge and appreciate everyone who works in open edtech in Higher Education. 

Looking Back on OEGlobal 2024

OEGlobal 2024 happened earlier this month, and it was an amazing event! Open Education Global does phenomenal work to support open communities in higher education around the world, and we were lucky enough to get the change to support their work with the Conference of the Air, a remote event that allowed listeners to tune in to presentations.

Our blog post here talks more about the conference and what we were looking forward to in the leadup, but if you missed it, you can find recordings of the Conference of the Air sessions available here. Check it out, and make sure to support OE Global's awesome work all year round!

Your Guide to the WordPress Drama

Our recent November Community Chat was a get-together to talk through the recent conflicts going on between Automattic, the company owned by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, and WP Engine, a large hosting company that offers WordPress to its customers. The replay will be available soon on archive.reclaim.tv, but until then, we wrote a guide giving a little background on what's been happening and what impact this might have for the larger community (the answer is: "For now, not much.")

News from Infrastructure: OWASP Deployment & Rollback

Earlier in the month, we deployed numerous ModSecurity updates using the built-in OWASP vendor provided by WHM, in an effort to combat many issues with scanning and bot traffic we have seen lately and prevent them from affecting our clients. This was intended to be a planned low-impact update to guarantee satisfactory performance for all users, but that was not the case.

While we did roll this update out to our development servers to test its impact before rolling out the rules to all cPanel servers, there was an oversight in our testing process which didn't catch all issues. As a result, many users faced issues like 403 errors, authentication failures, and disconnects.

These rules have since been rolled back infrastructure-wide, and we are revising our testing process so we do not miss this again in the future. We apologize for the inconvenience.

News from Infrastructure: PHP Version Changes

As we mentioned in last month's Roundup, we'll be updating the default/"Inherit" PHP version on our servers soon, from PHP 8.0 to 8.1 (blog post with all the details here). We do need to issue a correction – last month, we stated that the work would be happening in early December. This date has been pushed back to give users more time to adjust, so these changes will be happening January 02, 2025.

These changes mean that any site using the Inherit version will be automatically moved up to 8.1, but no other sites will be affected. If you're not sure which version your site is using, you can always check or change it in the MultiPHP Manager tool in cPanel. We'll also have guides on that linked below in the Support Docs section.

Festive Reclaim TV and Radio Guide

Don't forget to tune in to Reclaim.TV! Live on Fridays at 10 am ET. Here's the schedule for the next month:

• December 6 - Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on Reclaim TV and Radio. It’s a Reclaim TV and Radio Special – with the team from Reclaim. We have had quite a year and our team is coming live on air to share some of the best bits of 2024, the drama that shook the (edtech) world and how we have come out fighting the good fight for indie edtech on the other side. 
• December 13 - Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on Reclaim TV – Case study bonanza. It may not yet be quite time for the holidays, but this is one cracking holiday special you don’t want to miss. Over the course of the year we have worked together with truly inspiring educators to tell their story of empowering students and staff using open edtech. This is a special bumper edition of goodness, bringing together all the case studies into one inspirational hour on Reclaim TV. 
• December 20 - Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on DS106 Radio. It’s the HOLIDAY SPECIAL. We are inviting you to join us for the one and only edtech radio holiday special, featuring guests from the legendary DS106 Radio Summer Camp. There is going to be story telling, holiday tunes and, if you are very lucky, even a bit of festive KaraOERke. The elves are working hard on that one. So listen in and play along as we ROCK the airwaves and ring in the holidays. All you need is a web browser. Tune in to DS106Radio and enjoy.

And check out this past month's streams if you haven't already!

The Reclaim Firewall Project. Noah, Pilot, and Taylor about Reclaim's latest infrastructure project, a new distributed firewall!

Chatting about Archiving with Corrine & Alex from Virginia Tech . How do you archive student work and institutional work? How do you archive work that doesn't fit into the traditional boxes, like programming projects, video games, and mixed media presentations?

Moving from Hugo to Ghost . Taylor's made a big CMS switch for his blog, he has lots of feeling about it, and wants to share what he's learned.

We recently spoke with Dr. Amanda Licastro, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Swarthmore College, about everything from the limits and possibilities of virtual reality in higher ed to the challenges of archiving protest signs from Swarthmore’s Peace Collection. Watch The Future of Multidimensional Scholarship with Jim, Pilot, & Amanda to learn more and read the related post on Jim's blog.

Recent Blog Posts

It wouldn't be the Roundup without the Bava! Jim's been holding down the blogging fort this month, and every post is a hit:

• In "Human Made’s S3 Uploads Plugin", he shares his recent experiments with Humanmade's plugin for offloading media to S3. This plugin is super cool, flexible, and particularly useful for large sites.
• "Converge 10 Years On" is a celebration of a celebration. Back in October, UMW celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Hurley Convergence Center (originally the Information Technology Convergence Center). Jim took the opportunity to share great memories from his time at UMW.
• This month, we got to have VA Tech's Corinne Guimont and Alex Kinnaman on ReclaimTV (recording here!). "An Open Conversation with VA Tech on Archiving and Much More" covers Jim's reflections on that awesome conversation.

And as a cherry on top, Maren Deepwell blogged this month about "How to get your blogging mojo back". It's a great guide for anyone who's looking to reclaim the spark of blogging, or for people who want to get started!

Support Documentation

With our recent announcement that we're changing the inherited version of PHP to 8.1, you may need to change the PHP version in cPanel. Never fear! We've got you covered with our process outlined in our documentation.

If you run into any errors after the change, we recommend following our guide to troubleshooting common WordPress errors.

And that's all for this month, folks! We'll catch you in December for the Reclaim Rewind – see you there!