The Roundup Turns Two!
News from January 2024
Wow, what a start to the year! We're celebrating the Roundup's birthday this month, along with a whole host of other things. Let's get right to it.
Announcements
New Offering - ReclaimEDU
Reclaim started 2024 off with a bang! That's right, we kicked off the New Year with a new offering: ReclaimEDU. You can catch more details in the blog announcement here, but the long and short of it is that this is a new type of hosting we're offering for top-level .edu websites. University homepages are core infrastructure, a digital campus tour for anyone looking to learn about the institution, and ReclaimEDU is expertly designed to meet the speed, stability, and security requirements for any .edu site.
February Workshop - DoOO & WPMS 101
Less than a month remains until the Domain of One's Own/WordPress Multisite 101 admin workshop! That's right, it's coming up fast. On Wednesday February 21st and Thursday 22nd, we'll be hosting an admin extravaganza.
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 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 awesome, and we hope you'll join us, so why not register on the events calendar right now?
April Flex Course - Ghost Un-Ghosted: Revisiting Our Favorite Newsletter Platform
We can't stay away! In April we'll be planning a flex course all about Ghost. "But Reclaim," you say, "didn't you do that one already?" Yes, but that was over a year ago!
The Ghost platform has evolved a lot since our last flex course, so we're declaring an honorary spooky season this spring and hosting a new one from April 15th to May 3rd, where we'll talk about Ghost – how we use it, how it's grown and changed, and how our use of it has grown and changed. Check out the events calendar to sign up, 'cause this flex course will truly be the Ghost with the Most…
February Community Chat - Reclaim ❤️’s Open Education Week
For this month’s Community Chat, Alan Levine will join us to talk about Open Education Week! If you didn’t know, OE Week is an annual celebration that provides a chance to share and learn about the latest achievements in Open Education, and this year, it’s March 4th-8th. Join us for the Community Chat on February 14th at 12pm ET to learn more, get hyped, and get ready! (You already guessed, but details and registration are on the events calendar.)
News from Infrastructure - WordPress Plugin Vulnerability
Our Infrastructure team was recently alerted to a security vulnerability in a commonly-used WordPress plugin, File Manager Pro. If you use this plugin on your site, we encourage you to update it immediately. If you believe your site was compromised, please contact Support right away so we can work with you to get this addressed. More details regarding how the vulnerability works are available on our announcements blog.
In Case Ya Missed It
For 2024, we're entering our Stream Era, coming at you with weekly Friday streams with the most diverse mix of topics and Reclaim team members yet!
Taylor and Meredith kicked off the New Year with their Welcome Back! stream on Jan 5th, chatting about projects, games, and looking ahead to what’s next in the new year at Reclaim.
Then, on Jan 12th, Taylor was joined by Pilot and Amanda to talk about working on their best-note-taking-selves with another stream on Obsidian, the markdown-powered note-taking app.
The following week Amanda and Maren popped on for a quick Reclaim TV installation they called New Year's Resources, giving viewers another walk-through of all the places you can find Reclaim on the web, and how to best interact with us to stay up-to-date with our events and news.
In the final stream of the month, Taylor and Noah dive into the awesome Open-Source Security Tools and Methodologies we use to help us keep our servers secure and in tip-top shape!
Streams happen every Friday at 10am ET on archive.reclaim.tv, so hop into our raft while we keep the streams flowing and check out next month's stream schedule:
- 02/02, Reclaim TV: Revisiting Ghost Newsletters (amid Substack’s implosion)
- 02/09, Reclaim TV: A technical walkthrough of our Event Calendar!
- 02/16, Reclaim TV: Reclaim & OER #4Ever
- 02/23, Reclaim TV: Recapping our recent workshop and looking ahead at what's next for DoOO and WPMS
Recent Blog Posts
Our new blogging space Reclaim the Blog is going from strength to strength since its launch last month! The whole Reclaim team is getting involved, with posts about how to keep safe Security PSA: High Severity Plugin Vulnerability, how to reclaim your newsletter and how to find the right support resources for you and your team.
If you are yet to start or continue your blogging habit in 2024, there's plenty of inspiration right here: Jim kicked off the blogging year strongly with his post on Demystifying AI (it's not magic, it's math!) and the holiday period reflection on Zoomfloppy Driver Issues. Amanda meanwhile jumped into new year blogging with a great look back at our flex course Open Publishing Ecosystems. And, inspired by this month's ReclaimEDU launch, Maren wrote about meticulous informality.
More goodness from BavaTuesdays rounded out our blog posts for January, as Jim shared A Guided Videodrome Review using ChatGPT. Definitely the post that inspired the most comments this month :)
Remember, a blog post a day keeps the AI zombies away...
Support Documentation
With the new Spring semester comes a few bits of extra troubleshooting! We absolutely feel you there, which is why we've got some awesome Domain of One's Own and WordPress Multisite guides to help out.
P.S. We're chatting through these in more detail at our Admin DoOO and WPMS Spring Workshop in Febuary! Check out our events page for more details and reserve your spot.
Domain of One's Own:
WordPress Multisite:
Staff Picks
We've got a staff picks sections chock-full of recommendations this month!
To kick things off the team had a bunch of ebooks and audiobook related recommendations, so here's a lightning round. Noah started things off by sharing a collection of classic audiobooks on Spotify. Jim brought up Librivox, a site full of free public domain audiobooks. Jason likes Libby, an app for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from your local library. And finally, Pilot shared Standard Ebooks, a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks, and the Letters from Watson newsletter which delivers Sherlock Holmes stories right to your inbox!
In the category of "cool tools", Meredith shared Scribe which is a tool that lets you make good looking documentation, complete with screenshots and annotation, quickly and seamlessly! Chris shared Mozilla's SSL Configuration Generator, which helps you generate SSL configurations for various different web servers, reverse proxies and more. Taylor had the Git it Write plugin for Wordpress, that lets you write posts in markdown and publish them from a git repository, as well as Obsidian's 2023 Gems of the year blog post, in case you didn't get enough Obsidian discussion on Reclaim TV.
Finally, in a category we're going to dub "internet gems," Pilot shared listen.hatnote.com, which lets you listen to wikipedia edits and updates. Amanda shared a blog post from Maggie Appleton called Ambient Co-presence which is definitely worth a read. Maggie's blog is fantastic, and well worth adding to your RSS reader!
All right, signing off until next month. It's hard to believe we've been doing the Roundup for two whole years. Thanks for joining us on this wild ride.
