Spooky Scary Roundup Time

Reclaim Hosting -

News from October 2024

Don't worry, you've got nothing to fear from this Roundup! Just good old-fashioned treats for a fantastical Halloween.

Announcements

November Community Chat: The WordPress Drama

October's been a spooky month with everything that's been going on around WordPress. So for the upcoming November Community Chat, we thought it made sense to talk about the Automattic and WP Engine drama, what that means for WordPress and the community of folks who use WordPress, and generally provide a place to ask questions, discuss, and share advice. RSVP here to join us on November 20th, 12pm ET!

This GIF is maybe a little more light-hearted than we feel...

And if you're new to the Community Chat-o-sphere, this blog post has all the details on what they are and why we host them. You can even rewatch old ones on Reclaim TV! The October one is available right here: October Community Chat: Looking ahead to OEGlobal24!

OpenLab at the University of New Haven: A Reclaim Case Study

How do you get from a single WordPress blog to building pages with students across a school or institution? Or how do you empower students on the open web using tools like OpenLab?

We recently had the opportunity to chat with Mary Isbell regarding her work at the OpenLab at the University of New Haven, originally a small passion project which has grown significantly with grant funding from the Davis Educational Foundation. Find out what has happened since and how this initiative has benefited students and faculty in Higher Ed in our brand new case study detailing this success story!

Mary Isbell, Associate Professor and Assistant Dean for Student Recruitment and Retention at University of New Haven

News from Infrastructure: Changes to PHP Versions on cPanel

Time marches on, and so too does software. As we work to keep our servers up-to-date, we need to make sure that old versions of PHP are cycled out, and that the PHP default keeps moving forward. As such, we will be changing the default, or "Inherit", version of PHP on all cPanel servers in early December, from 8.0 to 8.1. Only the default command-line PHP and sites set to "inherit" the PHP version will be impacted by this change, and this will only affect Shared Hosting, Domain of One's Own, and Managed cPanel servers.

If your server's "inherit" PHP version is already 8.1 or higher, these changes will not impact your server.

We've also outlined future changes through the end of 2025 in this blog post, including plans to eventually move to PHP 8.2 as the "inherit", and to remove 7.3 and 7.4.

News from Infrastructure: Decommissioning Email on cPanel

Over the next several months, Reclaim Hosting will be phasing out email tools on our cPanel servers, with the intent to have them completely removed in Spring of 2025. We made this decision due to a variety of factors, including the security risks created by managing email in a shared hosting environment, as well as limitations which impede our ability to provide a quality email experience.

These changes will primarily affect users on Shared Hosting servers, and will only remove the Email tools available from the cPanel user interface. Servers will still be able to send system-level mail such as password resets and account invitations. The vast majority of our Domain of One's Own and Managed cPanel clients do not use the Email tools, which was another factor in our decision; if you are an exception, please contact us regarding next steps for your project.

We are in the process of developing resources and instructions for users needing to migrate email to other providers, with the goal of making those available in the first week of December.

Reminders from Infrastructure: Review Servers for Suspicious Accounts

This is a periodic reminder from Infrastructure to please regularly review your user lists for any unidentified or suspicious accounts. If you spot anything that looks out of place, please reach out to us right away so we can take a look.

Be on the lookout!

News from EdTech: New OpenWebUI Installer on Reclaim Cloud!

We're pleased to announce a new installer on Reclaim Cloud! As AI becomes more of a hot topic these days, we did a stream a while back on Open Learning Language Models and how to run Open LLMs on Reclaim Cloud with OpenWebUI. Based on that, we've now turned OpenWebUI into a one-click installer! More details in this blog post, or in the Reclaim TV stream Taylor and Meredith did a couple weeks back (more on that below).

Reclaim TV Guide

Don't forget to tune in to Reclaim.TV! Live on Fridays at 10 am ET. Here's the schedule for the next month:

  • November 01 - The Reclaim Firewall Project. Tune in for a chat with Noah, Pilot, and Taylor about Reclaim's latest infrastructure project, a new distributed firewall!
  • November 08 - Chatting about Archiving with Corrine & Alex from Virginia Tech . How do you archive student work and institutional work? How do you archive work that doesn't fit into the traditional boxes, like programming projects, video games, and mixed media presentations?
  • November 15 - Moving from Hugo to Ghost . Taylor's making a big CMS switch for his blog, he has lots of feeling about it, and wants to share what he's learned.
  • November 22 - Public Obsidian notes on cPanel . Oh yeah, we're back with another Obsidian stream. This time let's look at a static site generator that's pretty easy to use, and designed for Obsidian called Quartz!

And check out this past month's streams if you haven't already!

We recently spoke with Dr. Amanda Licastro, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Swarthmore College, about everything from the limits and possibilities of virtual reality in higher ed to the challenges of archiving protest signs from Swarthmore’s Peace Collection. So tune in to this episode about The Future of Multidimensional Scholarship with Jim, Pilot, & Amanda to learn more and read the related post on Jim's blog.

Watch Meredith and Taylor explore Open WebUI on Reclaim Cloud:

We explored WordPress Multisite experimentation through the work at St Olaf, with special guest Bret Farley talking us through his exploration and customizations he and his team use to create a custom WPMS instance for their school:

Staff Picks

Get ready. Buckle up. Let's go! We have a SCARY amount of staff picks coming your way through this month.

Pilot shared a free to use, browser based synthesizer called midi.city, and as a follow-up Chris shared a free and open source, DAW called LMMS. If you are looking for something simple or you need a powerful audio editor and music creation suite, we've got you covered!

Taylor and Pilot got to spend a few days in Providence for the OpenEd24 conference. If you find yourself hungry and in Providence, they recommend checking out Friskie Fries!

Next up, we have a handful of links that came from our Community Chat:

Taylor shared ArchiveBox, an open-source and self-hostable web archiving tool which recently announced a bunch of really cool new features. He also wanted to share Susty which is a fast, minimal, and sustainability focused WordPress theme.

Noah shared Argus, which is a powerful set of dozens of information gathering, security research, vulnerability scanning, and ethical hacking tools all rolled up into one nice menu-driven command line interface. It's definitely worth a look if you have a use case or if you are eager to learn about this kind of stuff!

Keep yourself safe!

If you've heard about the drama between Automattic and WP Engine, and want to get caught up, Pilot has you covered with this summary from WPBeginner and this fiery but detailed blog post from Josh Collinsworth.

Lastly, we have a ton of web treasures (or should we say web treats, no tricks here) that defy categorization for you to check out:

And that's all, folks! Thanks for joining us for another great Roundup, and... HAPPY HALLOWEEN!