Let's Get Festive!

News from November 2023

Boy, what a month! We've got a lot of news to wrap up November and launch into the end of year, so let's not wait.

Monthly Announcements

Ongoing Flex Course - Open Publishing Ecosystems

It's here, it's here, it's here! The Open Publishing Ecosystems flex course kicked off this past Tuesday, and it'll continue through December 19th 2023. We're sitting down every week to dig into various open publishing tools – what they are, how they work, and what they can best help you accomplish. We’ll be looking at HedgeDoc, Manifold, Docsify-This, and HAX, highlighting where each of these tools shine. Here's the schedule:

• Session 1: Hedgedoc – November 28th at 12PM ET
• Session 2: Manifold – December 5th at 12PM ET
• Session 3: Docsify-This – December 12th at 12PM ET
• Session 4: HAX – December 19th at 12PM ET

Open Publishing Ecosystems is taking place in the classic Reclaim style, with weekly video premieres where you can all take part in the live chat, and all resources for the week available after each premiere for anyone wanting to follow along asynchronously. It’s free for all to attend and hosted through our community Discord server, and you can catch up on all past sessions here.

December Tunes - Festive Radio!

This December, the unparalleled Maren Deepwell is joining us to bring you a festive, merry, and all-around holidays-ical month. We had a ton of fun doing spooky radio with Maren on Halloween, so we're bringing it back!

These sessions will happen in place of some of our Friday streams: on Friday, December 8th from 10am-2pm ET we'll be hosting a radio winter wonderland with special guest Lauren, and on Friday, December 22nd we'll have festive karaoke on Reclaim TV, cross-cast to Reclaim Radio! (The schedule on that second one is being finalized, so stay tuned to our social media or community Discord for more info there.) If you've got time this holiday season, come jam with us – it's going to be sweet.

February Workshop - DoOO & WPMS 101

This fall was a crazy time all around, and one unfortunate side effect of the chaos was that we had to reschedule our Domain of One's Own/WPMS 101 admin workshop. Good news, though: we've got the workshop back on the calendar, and we can't wait!

The workshop will be held over two days on February 21st and 22nd, 2024. Day 1 will be all things DoOO, while Day 2 will be WPMS-focused, so that you can attend either day (or both!) depending on what's most useful to you. We'll cover both concrete, technical details of how the systems work, and dive into admin topics about how to make best use of the platform and plan for future success. It's going to be a great time, and we can't wait to see you, so mosey on over to the Events Calendar for all the registration details.

December Community Chat - Happy 2023, Everyone!

2023 has been one heck of a year, and we want to spend the last Community Chat of the year with you. Come join us as we celebrate, commiserate, ruminate, anticipate, and all the other -ates we can think of. We'll share everything that happened at Reclaim in 2023 (and it was a lot!) if you'll join the party. December 13th, 2023, at 12pm ET... the details are, as ever, on our trusty events calendar.

November Community Chat - Open Publishing & Why You Should Do It (Come to Our Flex Course in Two Weeks!)

It's an open secret that we're a little obsessed with Open Publishing these days – we spent all of November getting ready for the flex course! And that includes the November Community Chat, where we got to sit down and talk to you all about what you look for, think about, and dream of when it comes to Open Publishing. It was an amazing conversation, but if you missed it, no worries: we've got the whole thing on replay. (And a playlist of other past community chats, too, if you want to go even further back!)

News from EdTech/Infrastructure - New RShiny Installer on Reclaim Cloud!

Reclaim Cloud has a shiny new RShiny installer! We noticed some issues with the previous one, which was using an out-of-date Docker image, so Taylor went ahead and whipped up a new one based on an image that is being maintained. Shine on!

News from Sales - Managed Hosting Pricing Changes

Reclaim's Managed Hosting price changes will be going into effect for all renewals happening on or after January 1st, 2024. If you want to get a sense of what those changes will mean for you, our Managed Hosting cost calculator can help you estimate it. We're also happy to work with schools interested in renewing before December 31st, if you'd like to renew early and/or for multiple years under the current pricing model – just reach out and let us know.

News from the Roundup - Adjusted Release Schedule for December

And one last note, while we've still got you here! Reclaim's going to be taking the last week of 2023 pretty easy, so you should expect the Roundup early this month. Rather than coming out on the last weekday (Friday the 29th), it'll come out one week earlier on Friday the 22nd. We'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming in January.

In Case Ya Missed It

The streams this month were a bit of looking-back and looking-ahead... which is pretty much the general vibe of November when you think about it!

A decent amount of the gang showed up to look back on how radical our Reclaim Radio Halloween special was in Breaking down Reclaim Halloween Radio. The whole team participated, either hosting radio sessions with music, chatter, stories, or by making suggestions to those of us going live. Hopefully you were able to catch it when we were live at https://listen.reclaimrad.io/ (or catch us some time this December!) Overall consensus: we're #radio4life!

Maren and Taylor took the reins the following Friday to take a loving look back at Maren and Lauren's 2022 hit flex course, Hacks for Hybrid Working in the stream Hacks for Hybrid - Revisited (with Dr. Maren Deepwell). It was fun to reminisce and think about how far folks have come since participating in the original course. Maren shared SO many great tips that simply can't be missed, so be sure to check it out for maximum remote working awesomeness.

Finally, Taylor, Pilot, and Amanda got together to admire Taylor's new Hedgedoc installer on Reclaim Cloud and look forward to our Open Publishing Ecosystems flex course in our stream of almost the same exact name, Checking out our Hedgedoc installer and looking ahead to Open Publishing Ecosystems! If you're wondering what this flex course is going to be about and why we're doing it, don't miss this casual intro stream.

There are going to be some modifications to the stream schedule for the month of December (you may have already seen a mention of them in the announcements!). Here's what we have planned:

• Friday, December 1st (10am ET) at reclaim.tv: Jim will be showing off his vinylcast setup and how he uses it with Azuracast and other applications to play vinyl records directly on Reclaim Radio! (This session will also be broadcast on listen.reclaimrad.io.)
• Friday, December 8th (10am ET-2pm ET) at listen.reclaimrad.io: It's a winter wonderland of festive radio! Maren and the team will be bringing you sweet jams, plus a visit from a special guest: Lauren!
• Friday, December 15th (10am ET) at reclaim.tv: As the Open Publishing Ecosystems flex course comes to a close, we'll sit down for a retrospective stream on the course's highlights, all the featured tools, and what we're thinking about for the final week of the course.
• Friday, December 22nd (timing TBD) at reclaim.tv: It's time for some festive karaoke and fun! To celebrate the end of an awesome year (our tenth!), we're inviting you for some fun on the videowaves, through both Reclaim TV and Reclaim Radio. Stay tuned to our social media for more info on the exact schedule. (This session will also be broadcast on listen.reclaimrad.io.)
• Friday, December 29th: No stream this week! We're taking it easy for the holidays.

Recent Blog Posts

Looking back at the posts in November, there were a fair amount of posts, and quite a few centered around media and streaming, so let's take a look at some of those...

Taylor kicked it off with a one-liner about streaming a video file using an ffmpeg command. This is some serious minimalistic streaming, and if you like the command line kung-fu, this may be right up your alley. Pushing towards the other side of the simplicity scale, Tim posted about the wicked vertical live stream setup he put together for streaming pinball to TikTok. Jim joined the fray to share a bit about his home media setup while preparing for a live stream this Friday focused on his current audio and video broadcasting setup.

Meanwhile, Tim continues to fully embrace his inner-streamer, and has committed to a weekly cast to highlight all things Reclaim Arcade. He even had a little throwback easter egg in that post highlighting some glory days streaming back in the era of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology (DTLT) at University of Mary Washington.

And finally on the streaming front, Taylor rounds it off by detailing the work he did to hack Owncast to give ReclaimTV, our streaming home online, a makeover that really ties the room together.

A topic directly related to streaming is offloading content. As your site's media becomes more and more (and bigger and bigger), offloading that media to somewhere besides your server becomes increasingly more important. This month Jim has been blogging about the process of media offloading for apps such as WordPress (assorted files), Azuracast (audio), and Peertube (video). Part of the push was a result of Reclaim's recent mission to containerize its various Mastodon instances, and realizing how much easier that process was given the media had been offloaded from the very beginning.

From offloading to archiving, the ongoing, never ending process of keeping bavatuesdays whole continues at its glacial pace. Nonetheless, advances are being made and in "It Came from the bava Archive, Volume 1" Jim not only reflects on the blog archiving process, but is once again reminded of the apparitional media magic that is the Internet Archive's Wayback machine.

And all this work is in the name of building anew: Oblivion University which will be an open source collection of tools that rises like a phoenix from the flames—learning in the AI aftermath should never be so fun.

In fact, the good Doctor may make an appearance at the OER Conference being hosted in Cork, Ireland next year. A conference which few know more intimately than Maren Deepwell, who wrote about her excitement for what promises to be 2024's most exhilarating event (Gasta! Gasta! Gasta!)

As you can see, the Reclaim blogsphere is red-hot, even if the bava teeters on the edge of forever uptime :)

Support Documentation

This month, we have been focused on a fun NEW project that's coming up! As a result our documentation is a little light, but here's a little sneak peek as we take the time to really study up on all things Cloud while we build out this project. We've got File Management in ReclaimPress by Amanda for a quick look into the new interface.

Outside of that, as we're approaching finals season, we have some guides through our Web Hosting and cPanel section that can help with any troubleshooting needs as you're wrapping up another semester. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Staff Picks

To kick off this month's staff picks, Jim has been on an edge computing kick while experimenting with different tools that make multi-server, multi-region hosting faster and easier. If you've not heard of edge computing, this post and accompanying video will get you up to speed: Cloudless: Computing at the Edge. One of the tools we're most excited about is called Edgeport, that lets you even run a copy of your WordPress site on the edge!

Taylor shared two different tools this month. The first is Cron Calendar which is an amazing calendar app, specifically for Google Calendar, that has fantastic time booking features and excellent support for multiple time zones. The other is StreetPass a handy browser extension that gathers mastodon accounts for you to follow from people who have included their personal site as a custom verified link in Mastodon.

This last one is most exciting if you do a lot of work with Docker, but the joke's on all of you: Taylor wrote the Staff Picks section this month, so he's excited about this one! Noah shared Compose Watch, a feature of docker-compose that significantly improves the efficiency of working or debugging Docker Compose setups. By following this setup, any changes made to a docker-compose file will be immediately reflected as soon as you stop typing and save the file. You can find detailed documentation on Compose Watch here.

And that's the Roundup for this month! Thanks for a great November, everyone.