Rockin' the June Roundup
News from June 2023
Happy summer! We're brightening up your Friday with all the fun Reclaim happenings from the past month, so kick back and enjoy.
Monthly Announcements
Reclaim Open Online
We had so much fun at Reclaim Open, we just had to keep the magic going! Throughout the month of July, we'll be re-broadcasting some of the recorded sessions from the conference. So if you missed a session in person, this next month will be a great opportunity to tune in! We’ll also be sharing blog posts, community reflections, chats with some of the conference presenters, and two great keynote speakers: Olia Lialina, who will be diving into the Web That Was, and Ian Linkletter, who will bring us his call to action to resist surveillance in edtech and solidify education as a right for everyone.
We'll kick off Reclaim Open Online this Wednesday, July 05th at 12 PM Eastern, with a special Reclaim Today episode reflecting on all the wonderful experiences you all brought to the conference. That session, as well as all the others, will be hosted through our watch site, so definitely bookmark that page, but announcements and discussion will happen in our Discord server. So if you're not there already, come join the community! We can't wait to see you there. (And hey, in case you don't know the drill: we've got details on all this month's events on the event calendar.)
Reclaim Open Online - Keynote by Olia Lialina
One of the great events you can attend at Reclaim Open Online? A rocking keynote from scholar and artist Olia Lialina. Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Olia is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia, as well as being cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany (and a GIF model!).
Her talk at Reclaim, “Seeing 30 years of the WWW through different trajectories,” will map broader design and usability shifts over 30 years of the web through distinct moments and trajectories that highlight the steady loss of agency with monolithic platforms that erase the playful, personal spirit that made this space revolutionary. The talk will be streamed freely for any and all interested on July 17th at 12 PM Eastern (6 PM Central European) on our watch site, and attendees can join the conversation in Discord!
Details are on the event calendar, and Olia has also made references for her presentation available here. Jim also has a nifty blog post introducing Olia and her talk that you can check out here: "Olia Lialina at Reclaim Open’s Virtual Event".
Reclaim Open Online - Keynote by Ian Linkletter
And another awesome Reclaim Open Online announcement: we're honored to have edtech’s patron saint of resisting student surveillance, Ian Linkletter, joining us on July 24th at 12 PM Eastern (9 AM Pacific) to discuss the role of ethical edtech. As many of you already know, Ian’s experience battling Proctorio's SLAPP lawsuit has provided him a uniquely personal story surrounding the costs and dangers of ceding control of higher education’s mission provide equitable and ethical access to mediated learning environments.
Ian's cause is for everyone who believes that education not only is a fundamental right, but provides the basic toolkit for every citizen to battle tyranny. Join us on the Reclaim Open watch site on July 24th for Ian’s call to action advocating for ethical edtech in the work we do.
Details are also on the event calendar here, and as before, you should check out Jim's sweet blog post "Ian Linkletter’s Call to Action at Reclaim Open".
Reclaim Open Online - Reclaim Open's Documentary, Remixed!
Alright, one more highlight, because we just can't resist. If you attended Reclaim Open, you may remember the documentary produced at the event. We wanted to highlight the edtech stories of those in attendance, interviewing everyone we could about their thoughts on the past, present and future open web, and challenged ourselves to create a documentary out of the interview by the end of the conference.
While we're not going to make another documentary, we will be ending the month celebrating those stories again. On Monday, July 31st at 12 PM Eastern, join us on the watch site as we rewatch the documentary, and maybe premiere a little bonus content to boot. You can find the details on the event calendar (naturally), and we can't wait to see you there!
New Omeka Classic Installer in Reclaim Cloud
Maybe you haven't heard, but from time to time we put out custom installers for Reclaim Cloud if we find that there's an app that's missing from the marketplace. This past month Taylor created a brand new installer for Omeka Classic, which means now Omeka Classic and Omeka S are both available on Reclaim Cloud! Why not go check it out?
Farewell, Paper Lantern!
It's been a long time coming, and it's finally here: as of cPanel v110, Paper Lantern is no more. Instead, users will see the new Jupiter theme applied when they visit their cPanel. You may have already started to see this change rolling out across cPanel servers; if not, it should arrive soon. We've been working hard to make sure our documentation reflects Jupiter's styling, so if you're looking through our support guides, cPanel screenshots should be current with the new experience.
Recent Blog Posts
Despite how busy we've been, we've always got time for blogging. Without further ado:
The star moment of the month for us was, naturally, Reclaim Open. And you wouldn't believe how many blog posts came out of the conference from us alone! We'll be sharing posts from other community members throughout July in Reclaim Open Online, but here are the ones from Reclaim.
For starters, we have one Reclaim Open post that was published before the conference even began: "Getting Ready for Reclaim Open" by Jim, talking about his thoughts while traveling to the States and how excited he is for all the major anniversaries of the summer (and all the cool Reclaim Open events, naturally)! And after the conference, Meredith published "Reclaim Open: Where We’re Going" reflecting on her time with the company since she joined in 2017, her role in the conference, and what she's looking forward to in the future.
Post-Reclaim Open, Jim still had more to share. "Reclaim Open at the Scale of this Blog" is a reflection on the past and future of the web, and how scaling the web may impact the climate. Meanwhile "Reclaim Open and Dream Teams" talks about the great community at the conference, getting to reconnect with the DTLT crew, and what the future of edtech might look like. Lauren's post "Reclaim Open: carving out spaces" talks about the process of planning the conference as well as the highlights of both planning and participating.
For a taste of some of the panels that happened at the conference, check out "A.I. Levine at Reclaim Open" and "Accused! ds106 on Trial" from Jim. The former is about Michael Branson Smith's AI-generated presentation, "given" by "Alan Levine" – or rather, an AI simulation of Alan based on recordings of his face and voice. And the latter is a session Jim co-created with Paul Bond, focusing on ds106 in the dramatic style of Colonial American trials. In it Paul was prosecuted by Jim, with Martha Burtis serving as the judge and the audience serving as the jury. (Psst! If either of these super-cool sessions sound fun to you, we'll be revisiting them during Reclaim Open Online!)
Less directly related to Reclaim Open, though still inspired, are two posts from Pilot and Taylor. Pilot's post "Learning to Learn; or, Online Barriers for Total Beginners" reflects on a common theme at the conference (that the internet makes it easier for beginners to find resources on any topic they could want) and how those resources don't necessarily mean they have developed the skills needed for self-directed learning. From Taylor, "To-do list for this site" includes various ideas for updating his blog, inspired from different conversations at Reclaim Open!
On a totally unrelated note, let's make a hard pivot to some of the great blogging going on around our work with Reclaim Cloud. Database management in the command line can be a little spooky, so Taylor's post "A quick Web UI for database management in docker-compose setups!" goes into how he creates a user interface to handle Docker databases, using the Adminer tool to make things a little easier to visualize.
Jim meanwhile wants everyone to know about "Reclaim Cloud’s 1-Click Mastodon Installer", which is what it sounds like – the one-click Mastodon installer Taylor built for Reclaim Cloud! In this post, Jim's sharing two videos he created on how to use the installer and how to edit the environment variables once you're up and running.
And Jim and Taylor collaborated to upgrade PostgreSQL on Jim's site bava.tv (hosted in Reclaim Cloud). From Taylor, "Some notes on upgrading PostgreSQL in Docker" includes instructions on the various commands and procedures needed for the upgrade, while Jim's post "Upgrading PostgreSQL Versions on bava.tv" thinks through the purpose of the upgrade beyond just benefiting his site, and how this work ultimately bolsters Reclaim's support capabilities.
Meanwhile, Pilot spent a little time this month "Mapping DoOO’s Systems". If you ever need a way to visualize how the three Domain of One's Own systems work together to deliver a user cPanel via WordPress, or if you have to explain it to someone who just does not know what the heck you're talking about, this is the post for you. There's even a PDF!
Enough work, it's time for some play. We're capping off this blog section with some fun posts from Jim and Tim. Jim's post "Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club" highlights his experiments with online karaoke over the past couple of years, and how the Reclaim watch site technology has created a real breakthrough.
And from Tim, a two part saga of Reclaim Arcade! "The Expansion" and "Video Wall 2: Electric Boogaloo" talk about all the work that's gone into expanding the arcade as it's grown and grown, making it even cooler than it was before, and just how the video projection wall got put together. These are an amazing behind-the-scenes at the tons of time, energy and thought that have gone into cranking Reclaim Arcade's awesome factor (already super high) all the way up to 11.
New Support Documentation
New month, new docs! From Meredith, we have "Updating Applications Manually", which will show you how you can, well, update your applications manually. This is a great tool to have in your back pocket for any cPanel application, and the principle holds similar for Omeka and Omeka S plugins as well, which also need manual updates.
Additionally, as we bid a fond farewell to Paper Lantern, cPanel's layout has changed a little bit – specifically, a couple of domain management tools which were previously split out have now been consolidated under the Domains tool. As such, Lauren's made a couple updates to our existing guides. You can check out the shiny new editions of "Wildcard Subdomains", "Adding an Alias Domain", and "Creating and Managing Subdomains" right now.
Staff Picks
It's a light month for staff picks, but we've still got a couple of shoutouts we wanna make. From Gordon, it's the DNS Detangler, a funky little tool that will take a domain and unpack information about it like its nameservers, where the site is hosted, and a couple of its DNS records.
Meanwhile Taylor shared The Password Game in Slack, and we all immediately went nuts for it. It's a great tool for coming up with a secure password, because requirements include but are not limited to: uppercase letters, special characters, numbers (but only enough to add up to 25), a month of the year, Roman numerals that multiply together to make 35, and today's Wordle answer. No, that is not a joke.
And for a shortlist of all the stuff Tim's checked out this week, he's got a collection of links on his blog right here: Link List 6/28/23. There's recs for articles, a neat browser game, and a TV show if you're itching for a summer watch – lots to enjoy.
That's the Roundup for this month, everybody! As we head into the wild and crazy world of Reclaim Open Online this July, we've got only one thing to say: