March Was A Big Month

News from March 2024

Holy cow, is March over already? Time just keeps marching, huh. Well, let's hop to it – here's the Roundup!

Announcements

ReclaimPress is Now In Beta!

Our biggest announcement of the month: ReclaimPress is now available (in beta)! We've talked a lot about our new WordPress cloud hosting offering, and now we're excited to welcome you aboard the ReclaimPress Express!

Reclaim Cloud is great, but it's not always welcoming to new users, and the resource-based pricing can be unintuitive. Shared Hosting is awesome, but sometimes a site needs more resources than it can receive when it has to share a server with other sites. With four plan tiers priced from $5/mo to $40/mo and an elegant user interface, ReclaimPress lets us split the difference to offer scalable WordPress hosting that's standardized, straightforward and affordable.

This blog post has all the details on how to get started, along with more information on what we mean by a beta launch and a recording of our launch-day stream, so check it out today.

(Oh, and you know we can't resist the tunes, so while you're exploring ReclaimPress, consider putting our themed ReclaimPress playlist on in the background!)

April Flex Course - Newsletters with Ghost!

It's almost time for the dead to rise... Meaning, it's almost time for us to revive our free flex course Newsletters with Ghost, which is happening from April 15 to May 03!

In case you missed our blog post about it, Ghost is a free, open-source and self-hostable platform for newsletters and blogging. It's simple, elegant, and easy-to-use, and this flex course will make it approachable whether you're starting your very first newsletter or curious about switching platforms from Substack or WordPress.

We'll cover an introduction to the platform, configuring the settings and email, and our tips and tricks for running a newsletter, taking you from zero to newsletter in three one-hour sessions. These sessions will be happening on Tuesdays at 12pm ET, and you can attend them all for free by RSVPing on the events calendar!

Reclaim Case Study: ReclaimEDU

You may have seen it on our blog, but we recently rolled out a new case study on ReclaimEDU! Come read the story of how we fell in love with multiregion WordPress hosting, then transformed that passion into action by making it one of our newest offerings.

And if that whets your appetite for more, you're in luck! We're offering guided tours of everything ReclaimEDU has to offer. Reach out any time – we'd love to sit down, talk with you about your institutional .edu homepage, and think through how we can best support your campus in the cloud. (And for even more info, check out the ICYMIs section below, because we even did a stream on ReclaimEDU a couple weeks ago.)

April Community Chat - Workshop Share-a-thon

It's almost April, and you know what that means... that's right! On Wednesday, April 17th at 12pm ET, we're hosting our April Community Chat! This month's chat is centered around workshop planning, professional development, and instructional design. We're fortunate to have many talented educators in our broader Reclaim community, so we want to encourage you to join us and discuss a recent workshop that you’ve led or designed. It could be around Domain of One’s One, interacting with the web, digital identity, or really any broader educational or technology topic.

Tell us how you go about crafting engaging and informative activities, driving attendance on busy campuses, and tackling all the other challenges that go into planning a great workshop. Let’s learn from each other! And as always, you can RSVP on the events calendar.

March Community Chat - EdTech Origin Stories

If you couldn't make it to the March Community Chat, no worries. We had a great group of EdTechs join us to share their origin stories, and you can share in the fun by catching the rewatch right here! (And if you're feeling it, come on down to our community Discord server and share your own EdTech origin story.)

News from Infrastructure: Installatron Notification Changes

Installatron sends out a lot of notifications regarding software updates, failed (or successful backups), and other information about the application. We've noticed a recent increase in frequency for these notifications, so we're making changes to the default configuration for notifications across our servers in order to limit the emails end users receive. You can check out our blog post here for more information on the changes and what they'll mean for your project, along with steps for customizing Installatron notifications for your applications.

10 Years of Reclaim

For our final announcement, we're sharing Maren Deepwell's incredible visual anthology tribute, "10 Years of Reclaim". Maren put together a beautiful collection of Reclaim art from the past decade, and it blows us away every time we watch. You can read her post about it on the blog, and you can watch it right here:

In Case Ya Missed It

We have some March streaming madness for you!

Starting out strong on March 1, Maren invited Reclaim friend Anne-Marie Scott to chat about Using Open Source tools as key infrastructure.

The following streaming day, March 8, Taylor and Amanda had the chance to talk through the first Reclaim Case Study with the case study interviewee, Susan Norman in Reclaim TV: Simon Fraser University Bulk Shared Hosting - A Reclaim Case Study. Susan shared more detail about her stellar class, "The Publication of Self in Everyday Life," than we had space to fit into the case study, so don't miss it!

Jim, Pilot, and Maren took the stage on March 15 to gush about Reclaim’s latest foray into blazing fast, super-reliable web hosting in Reclaim TV: ReclaimEDU.

And since we'd just been so excited about #OER24 happening at the end of March, Meredith, Maren, and Jim couldn't help themselves from giving an OER Preview! Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education on March 22.

The streaming fun continues throughout April. You can catch the following on Reclaim TV:

• Monday, April 01 @ 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT — Best Support on the Internet - a Reclaim Game Show
• Friday, April 12 @ 9:00 am - 10:00 am EDT — Modeling Project Planning in DH through Games with Quinn Dombrowski
• Friday, April 19 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am EDT — Arc Browser
• Friday, April 26 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am — YunoHost on Reclaim Cloud

Recent Blog Posts

Let's celebrate, because it's blogging season at Reclaim! (Okay, every season is blogging season at Reclaim, but that's even more reason to celebrate.)

Kicking things off, Taylor shared an anecdote about his daughter's Internet questions in, "What's a Website?", while Noah gave an update on his in-development video game GrugNet in "Devlog: Procedural Worlds".

Maren's post "All things open, all things fun!" was written in honor of Open Education Week, highlighting her recent conversations with Alan Levine, Martin Hawksey, Meredith Huffman, and Anne-Marie Scott about how to build open practice small-scale and large.

Jim hosted an episode of Reclaim Today, "The Dr. Oblivion Bot", which comes with its own tie-in blog post! He sat down with Paul Bond and Michael Branson Smith to talk about MBS's AI-generated Doctor Oblivion running over at Oblivion.University, which Paul is even incorporating into his recent ds106 course.

And on a related note, Jim's blog post, "ReclaimEDU: the Infomercial" talks about the ReclaimEDU stream he co-hosted with Pilot and Maren (check out the ICYMIs section for more info on that one, and the Announcements for a look at our ReclaimEDU case study)!

Meredith is having a blast at OER this week, but her blog post "Reclaiming the #edtech4life mentality" will tide us over 'til she's back. The post hits on some of the core topics of her presentation, including how to discover and explore open tools and open communities in this busy age, and where Reclaim fits into a larger EdTech sphere.

And finally, we'll leave you with a post from Jim, "That Mathers Aesthetic!" Inspired by Maren's visual anthology of Reclaim (more info in the Announcements), Jim reflects on how central the art of Bryan Mathers has been to Reclaim's identity over the past 10 years, how perfectly he captures the ethos of indie edtech, and how lucky we are to work with him.

Support Documentation

We are so excited to announce the beta launch of ReclaimPress to add to our range of products. As part of the preparations for the launch, our team spent a lot of time putting documentation together to help you get started on your ReclaimPress journey. So put on some tunes, go create some records, and learn all about ReclaimPress!

Staff Picks

Chris kicks things off this month with Quad9, which is a DNS provider that is security focused and also blocks domains that are known to distribute malware. The great thing about a free DNS service like this is you can set your home router to use it and all the devices on your network benefit!

Chris also shared The High Crusade by Poul Anderson which is available in audiobook form on YouTube. His description: "TL;DR: aliens come to earth, but it's medieval England, and a group of knights takes over the spaceship and fly to an alien world."

Noah shares Chiaki, which is an open-source remote play client for the PS4 or PS5. Basically, this will let you play games from those consoles over a remote connection to almost any device you can think of!

Taylor has three recommendations this month! First is this video from Molly White called Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes. The video goes into the basics of making an account, as well as touches on some basic media literacy that folks need to consider when getting started. Next is this article from the EFF on how to use your site's robots.txt file to ask OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard to not use your website for training. Finally, Taylor has been really liking Excalidraw, which is a free, web-based, collaborative drawing / whiteboarding / diagramming tool. Not only is it free to use, but it's also open-source which means it's been remixed in all kinds of ways, and perhaps best of all, it's available to use as an Obsidian plugin!

We're signing off for March, folks! Here's to another great month.