Hot Off the Presses!
News from June 2024
This June's been a hot one, and the Roundup is pretty hot too! Once you've read this, you can go cool off, but for now let's dive right in.
Announcements
News from Infrastructure: Client Portal Upgrades
Up first on the docket this month is some major news from Infrastructure: at the end of the month, on July 30th, we'll be upgrading our billing software and client management system. This blog post has all the details, but the long and short of it is that the Client Area portal will be unavailable on July 29th and 30th, and once the work is done, the URL will change (and be redirected) from portal.reclaimhosting.com to billing.reclaimhosting.com.
"What do I need to do?" Good question. This work won't affect your servers or take any of your websites offline, but you won't be able to access or pay any invoices due on the 29th and 30th, so please plan accordingly. If you access any of your cPanels from the Client Portal, such as Shared Hosting accounts, those will also be unavailable. After the work is done (so, July 31st & later), you'll need to:
- reset your Client Area passwords
- update payment details
- remake any sub-accounts currently on your billing account
Documentation on how to do this in the new system will be coming out over the course of July (and of course featured in next month's Roundup), and we'll share any updates over on our Breaking News blog. For now, all the current details can be found here, and you can always reach out to Support if you have any questions.
Welcome, Cass!
More exciting news: Reclaim welcomed a new team member this month! Cass le Fay recently joined us as an Escalated Support Specialist and Junior Systems Administrator, and he's already made a big impact on the team. Check here for the full welcome, including his bio, and help us celebrate his arrival! Good to have you, Cass.
Come Join DS106 Radio Summer Camp
Imagine summer camp, on the radio, connecting with friends old and new as you tell stories around the campfire, reflecting on the year that’s been and learning a whole lot along the way.
Join us this August live on DS106 Radio as we go to camp. Starting on Monday, August 12th, we’ll be taking to the airwaves with live shows featuring edtech storytelling, debate and our year in music. Every day for a week there’ll be live sessions sharing adventures in Higher Education and beyond as we celebrate the end of this academic year and pool our energies for the new term.
Jump into the cool, refreshing pool of DS106 inspiration! Join us as a speaker or DJ, or simply take your headphones, head outside in the sunshine and tune in. It’s online conferencing…. but not as you know it.
It’s free to attend, and we encourage you to bring a friend! And hey – if you've got words in your heart that you gotta bring to broadcast, the call for proposals is open through July 14th. Topic details are here, and you can submit your proposal when you sign up on the events calendar.
Fall Workshop - Domain of One's Own & WordPress Multisite 101
Reclaim Hosting is excited to be running another virtual workshop this fall focused on Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite! The workshop will be running Tuesday October 1st and Wednesday October 2nd, starting at 12pm ET each day and ending at 5pm ET. We'll provide both applied training and concrete examples of both administering and teaching with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, along with one-on-one time with Reclaim Hosting, as well as other present institutions.
The workshop is broken up into two distinct days. Day 1 will be dedicated to getting you comfortable administering and troubleshooting Domain of One’s Own, and Day 2 will focus on WordPress Multisite. You can sign up for either or both days, whatever piques your interest! Check out the events calendar for registration and ticket info, and a more in-depth breakdown of each day's agenda. We can't wait to see you there.
July Community Chat - Building Community and Reclaiming Our Socials
It's event central over here, and we're still not done! On Wednesday July 17th at 12pm ET, we're sitting down to think through the challenges and opportunities for building community on the web in an open way. We're offering our perspective on how we've "reclaimed our socials" and what we've learned, but we really want to hear from you about the ways you meet and engage with people online. RSVP on the events calendar here!
Case Study - "From passion project to web empire: A ReclaimPress case study"
And capping off a crazy month's worth of announcements, we even found time to publish a new case study! "From passion project to web empire: A ReclaimPress case study" tells the story of our new ReclaimPress offering and where it fits in today's web. We even got to sit down with Bryan Mathers, who designed the art for ReclaimPress and was one of its first adopters for his own sites, to hear about his experiences and opinions. It's well worth a read, so check it out!
Reclaim TV Guide
We had some cool streams this month! You can always catch up on all the goodness over on archive.reclaim.tv, but here's some quick summaries for the curious:
Taylor and Pilot teamed up to look at reveal.js. Reveal.js is a framework that allows you to create slides in HTML, so we talked about the many different ways you can leverage this tool to make slides, and how you can easily host your presentations on your website!
Taylor and Jim met up with Stephen Downes to chat through his recent experiences using Reclaim Cloud.
Jim jumped in for a solo stream as he's exploring Windows 98 and other retro computing! (Volume warning for parts of this one.)
If you wanted to hear more about how Reclaim is using marketing with Ghost, check out Jim's discussion with Tim Owens, co-founder of Reclaim Hosting and Reclaim Arcade. They chat through how Reclaim Arcade is currently using Ghost as a marketing tool as well.
In addition to the streams, check out our monthly Community Chat too! This month we created a book club examining Tom Woodward's blog post Necessary FUD. Catch up on the conversation: June Community Chat: Blog Post Book Club – “Necessary FUD?”
And we've got some more awesome streams coming up in July! Catch us on Reclaim TV, Fridays @ 10am ET:
- 07/05: Bringing the Internet back to Windows 98: Jim is jumping back in to retro computing and looking to get connected to the web on Windows 98
- 07/12: Looking ahead to DS106 Summer Camp: We're so excited for Summer Camp! Taylor and Maren are loking forward to August as we plan our DS106 Radio Camp.
- 07/19: Castopod: Looking for a self hostable podcast software? Check out, Castopod, a self-hostable podcasting tool with built-in analytics and Fediverse features! Taylor will fill you in on all the details.
- 07/26: Reclaim is headed to WPCampus 2024!: Meredith and Jim are looking forward to joining the WPCampus crew in DC this year as they take on Georgetown! They'll talk through what they're looking forward to most and hint at this year's presentation.
Recent Blog Posts
It's been said that NOBODY blogs like the bava, and that's proved quite true this month. Now whether that's a June bug or a feature is for you to decide....
Jim started June analyzing the costs of running a Mastodon server in Reclaim Cloud, if that is something you've ever wondered about. After that he wrote an ode to his first Reclaim computer, his 13" 2015 Macbook Pro workhorse ... it might be worth it for the stickers alone!
Thinking about life after cPanel, Jim's next post describes how he's spending less and less time in cPanel as more and more of his publishing infrastructure is hosted on services like Reclaim Cloud and ReclaimPress, with DNS run through Cloudflare and email run through Mailgun. Following on this post, "The Blog Generation" reflects on the long road of blogging in higher ed and how many of the folks we support have built-out an entire career on their blogs. As a result, there's a lot of importance that those spaces be not only portable as folks move between positions (God save WordPress!), but also both stable and fast (hello ReclaimPress!).
And the hits just keeping on coming from the bava, this time with the "Reclaim the Comms" post highlighting the ways in which Reclaim Hosting has been reclaiming their social footprint on the web (part of which is the regular Reclaim TV streaming every Friday). Jim follows up the discussion around Reclaim's Comms highlighting a number of streams we've done recently, while quoting Sonic Youth with the catchy blog title "Reclaim's Daystream Nation."
Finally, annual review season inspired a reflection on the power of good teams more generally, but specifically drilling down to the depth and strength of the current lineup of Team Reclaim.
Support Documentation
As the summer starts and you're looking for some new domains, we've got you covered! Here's how to add your new domain to cPanel.
If you're working with a new domain that needs to be accessed in a temporary location, check out our guide on Accessing a Temporary URL Using SkipDNS.
And of course, we've got your back if you need to restore anything through our Backup system Jetbackup. Happy Reclaiming this summer!
Staff Picks
This month we kick off our staff picks with one from Jim. He shared an article on how the BSAA program at BMCC uses OER to promote cultural competency and student engagement!
Noah shared this release trailer for Riven, a remake of the classic that just came out for PC, Mac, and Meta Quest devices!
Finally, Taylor shared the Web Design Museum (courtesy of Shannon in our Discord who shared it there first!) which is a screenshot and video gallery old websites, apps and software from 1990s to mid-00s.
And that's the Roundup for this month! Catch you in July.