The Inaugural Reclaim Roundup
News from January, 2022
We're excited to bring you the first installment of the Reclaim Roundup, our monthly newsletter collecting all the work that's been done by and around Reclaim! This January, Reclaim has a lot of updates and much to share.
Monthly Announcements
De-provisioning CloudLinux, Goodbye to Checks, and a New MSA
The start of 2022 meant a number of big changes at Reclaim, where we said a lot of goodbyes and hellos. We began the process of de-provisioning CloudLinux on all of our servers to move applications where we can better support them in Reclaim Cloud, moved away from accepting checks in our new payment policies, and updated our Master Services Agreement (all right, this one was in December, but we're still going to count it).
Please Welcome... Custom Installers!
Custom installers are now available! We're inviting developers in the community to share their work using custom one-click installers for their applications, which will in turn be available to more than 200 institutions and all 11,000+ Shared Hosting users. Lauren talked about the decision process behind this on her blog - check it out. Do you have an application you want the world to know about? Submit your work right here.
Community Chat
And, of course, we hosted our first Community Chat. Our Community Instructional Technologist Taylor was joined by almost fifty admins from Domain of One's Own schools and other guests to talk about fostering and recognizing collaboration and creativity in a school's community. We have a video, check it out!
Taylor also reflected on his experience creating the site tool that was the springboard for the conversation and leading the discussion – you can read that on his blog here.
We'll be hosting another Community Chat, "State of Reclaim!", on February 9th, about what Reclaim's been cooking up for 2022, including updates from different groups and news about the burgeoning Instructional Technology division at Reclaim as well as a re-invigorated return to the dream of a Domains API...
taylorjadin
Interested? You can keep up with Taylor's updates in the announcement forum, and register to join us by filling out this form. We'll be excited to see you!
NYCDH
Next Monday, February 7th, Jim will be joining a Roundtable at the NYC Digital Humanities Week Event to talk about "Supporting Digital Humanities" alongside Jennifer Serventi and Moacir de Sá Pereira.
In addition, on Tuesday, February 8th at 8 AM EST we'll be running a two-hour demonstration/workshop titled "Containing DH: How to Use Docker to Run Just About Anything:"
This session with be a demonstration of how to use Docker in Reclaim Cloud to run just about any application on the web. It will be interactive in that after the initial demonstration we will be taking requests from the audience to install those hard to run applications in order to model the process. Come to this session if you want to get your Digital Humanities project up and running without the need of an IT department.
Recent Blog Posts
It has been a good month for the blog at Reclaim Hosting, who said the blog was dead?
- Lauren offers a candid look into the process of de-provisioning over 10,000 sites for BYU as they discontinue their Domains offering. It was a Herculean project managed with elegance, and all the good folks at BYU deserve a special shout out for all your support over the years. The belief you had in our work from early on made so many of our subsequent successes possible—thanks Kelly, Phil, and Peter!
Lauren Hanks
- Discussions around a Domains API have re-kindled over the last month or two, and Tim posted a bit of context of what a long history there is behind this idea. It's one of the yet unrealized Reclaim projects that has been with us since almost the beginning, and it is quite exciting to see there is some time and energy to devote to it again!
- As mentioned above, Reclaim Hosting is now inviting developers in the community to share their work using custom one-click installers for their applications. Lauren wrote about the news as well as how she built out the landing site and submissions form on her blog, it is well worth a read:
Lauren Hanks
- Live Streaming is finding its way into Reclaim's culture more and more recently, and Taylor demonstrates this beautifully with his stream on how to spin up Foundry Virtual Table Top in Reclaim Cloud, as well as sharing his discovery of mapping a storage container to Foundry in order to access files while the Docker container is running.
Taylor streams his process of spinning up Foundry Virtual Table Top in Reclaim Cloud
- Learning in Reclaim Cloud has been a theme this month, and Meredith documented her experience of migrating an outdated Mattermost instance to a new, updated container. It points to a new era of cross-team collaboration and highlights just how much learning and professional development remain germane to the Reclaim experience.
Meredith Fierro
- And in his usual sanctimonious style, Jim gets righteous about instructional technology when imagining the future of edtech at Reclaim Hosting. If you can look beyond the aging EDUPUNK, there is real energy and possibility in the prospect of weaving edtech into the fabric of our work at Reclaim more intentionally.
Reverend
Reclaim EdTech!
- But in order not to be seen as totally useless, Jim does provide a tutorial for spinning up a Ghost container using Docker in Reclaim Cloud.
Video tutorial for spinning Up Ghost in Reclaim Cloud
There's even a followup on how to update your instance once you've got it running.
What's more, this Newsletter is being publishing using Ghost on Reclaim Cloud, and Jim provides more details for setting environmental variables for a Docker for anyone interested in exploring this tool:
Reverend
As well as documenting a look at Configuring Email for Ghost through Mailgun so this blogging engine can double as a robust newsletter service:
Reverend
- An here's a special shout-out to the "Canadian King of Newsletters," Stephen Downes, for actually watching the above tutorials and streaming the experience as part of his "Stephen follows Instructions" series. It was quite instructive to watch someone work through these tutorials, and his sharing spirit is only matched by his ongoing curiosity which is very much appreciated by the Reclaim crew. He's even getting a gRSShopper container working in Reclaim Cloud, impressive!
New Support Documentation
Throughout January our Support team has been looking at various ways to improve your digital life. Gordon's recent article, How to Set Up Directory Privacy in cPanel, covers setting up password-protected directories so that you can make sure that only users who you want looking at those directories have access.
Anyone who's worked with Installatron knows the feeling of waiting for a task to complete. But for when a task goes on just a little too long, Paul's written this article, Aborting a Task in Installatron.
Are you a WordPress Multisite admin? Meredith and Gordon have you covered, with three new articles: Accessing the WordPress Multisite Network Admin Dashboard, Running Updates in WordPress Multisite, and Accessing Sites Within the WordPress Multisite Network Admin Dashboard.
For Domain of One's Own admins who are looking to grow, Lauren has an update on what it means when you're Managing Multiple DoOO Servers. And for DoOO admins and anyone else managing a cPanel server, you may want to know what to do when AutoSSL starts sending you error emails - check out AutoSSL: "Potentially reduced SSL coverage" Errors, by Meredith.
Anyone working in Reclaim Cloud might be interested in Resetting Litespeed Admin User Passwords, by Lauren, or Installing PeerTube using Docker on Reclaim Cloud, brought to you by Jim.
And for anyone who's working on migrating their work between servers, or just interested in knowing a little more about SSH, Goutam has written External Server Access via SSH - go take a look.
Thanks so much for reading. You rock! And if you aren't subscribed yet and you want to be, you can always do that right here at the Roundup.