Want to try out Mastodon? Thinking about hosting your own? Or maybe you’re new to the experience and need some help or want tips for better connecting?  Our kind friends at Reclaim Hosting and ALT are doing a 90 day Mastodon experiment/class/seminar series where you can sign up for an account on a server that will self-destruct at the end of their trial run. They’re doing three sessions (live with recordings after), have a Discord for discussion and questions, and a Google doc with details and tips.

  • Session 1: Mission briefing: 19 January 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)
  • Session 2: Verifying your progress: 23 February 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)
  • Session 3: 30 days until self-destruct: 23 March 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)

Sign up on their server today to try things out: https://thismastodonwillexplo.de/

@reclaimhosting@reclaim.rocks @jimgroom@social.ds106.us @marendeepwell@social.ds106.us

A few short notes from the September 2020 Domain of One’s Own Meetup

Chris Aldrich:

The zoom room is open. We’ll be starting the Domain of One’s Own meetup in a moment. https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-september-2020–908ut7UmA2T3 @DavidDLaCroix @Cambridgeport90 @bixtra @tElizaRose @EduBabble @MorrisPelzel @jimgroom @willtmonroe @macgenie @KatieHartraft @poritzj @amanda_went_oer
Thanks to the community for helping to host our infrastructure for the meetup today. https://indieweb.org/ The notes for today’s meeting can be found at https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2020-09-22-dooo

timmmmyboy:

Giving a live demo of Mattermost on the Reclaim Cloud

Domain of One’s Own Meetup (September 2020)

I’ll be hosting a Domain of One’s Own meetup on Tuesday, September 22, 2020 at at 9:00 AM Pacific / 12:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM CEST. Everyone who is interested in the topic is welcome to attend.

We expect there will be students, teachers, designers, web developers, technologists, and people of all ages and ranges of ability from those just starting out with a domain to those running DoOO programs at colleges or even people running their own hosting companies.

We’ll meet via Zoom for audio/video and will use an Etherpad for real-time chat and note taking for the event

We will 

  • Have discussions about A Domain of One’s Own and the independent web;
  • Get to know others in the space;
  • Find potential collaborators for domains-related projects you’re working on;
  • Explore new and interesting ideas about what one can do or accomplish with a personal domain;
  • Create or update your domain
  • Ask colleagues for help/advice on problems or issues you’re having with your domain;

Agenda 

  • Welcome/Brief introductions
  • Main topic: This summer Reclaim Hosting launched Reclaim Cloud, but for many new and established Domains users, the “cloud” has been a nebulous buzzword with unclear meanings. In this meeting we’ll talk about what it is and why it might be important for gaining greater control over your personal cyberinfrastructure.
  • Group photo for those who wish to participate
  • Demos, questions, problems: 
    Ideally everyone should bring a topic, short demonstration of something they’ve built or gotten working on their website, a question, or problem to discuss with the group. Depending on time and interest, we can try to spend 5-10 minutes discussing and providing feedback on each of these. If questions go over this time limitation, we can extend the conversation in smaller groups as necessary after the meetup.

RSVP

To RSVP to the meetup, please (optionally) do one of the following:

Future meetups

While the time frame for this meetup may work best for some in the Americas, everyone with interest is most welcome. If there are others in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, or other locales who are interested, do let us know what dates/times might work for you in the future and we can try to organize a time to maximize some attendance there. I’m happy to help anyone who’d like to take the leadership of other time zones or locales to leverage some of the resources of the IndieWeb community to assist in starting future meetings to cover other areas of the world. 

Have a topic idea for discussion at the next session? Drop us a line by adding a comment to this post or one of the syndicated copies, ping me in chat, or track me down on your platform and means of communication of choice.

Invite your friends, colleagues, and students

Know someone who would be interested in joining? Please forward this event, or one of the syndicated copies to them on your platform or modality of choice.

Featured image: Hard Drive Repair flickr photo by wwarby shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Read Turn Off the Cloud Lights! by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays.com)
One of the things I have been doing over the last couple of months is tracking how many resources (known in Reclaim Cloud as cloudlets) each application environment requires. This is important because the more cloudlets you use the more you pay, so trying to be as efficient as possible is quite important. A cloudlet = 128 MiB + 400 MHz. Or, the equivalent of a ridiculously fast personal computer circa 1996 or 1997.
Read Look a(nother) Ghost by Jim Groom (BavaGhost)
Since May of 2014 I have been playing on and off with the blogging platform Ghost [http://ghost.org]. It has been an on again off again affair, and I have never left WordPress for it, but rather use it as a test bed for exploring how Reclaim might host applications outside the LAMP stack [https://blog.timowens.io/beyond-lamp/]---an ongoing theme for us over the last 3 or 4 years. So, I have been marking my progress with running Ghost both here on the bava as well as on my Ghost blog. I talked a
I want to tinker around with Ghost a bit too, but the bar just seems to be too high to bother with it. Then there’s the lack of IndieWeb tooling one could use with it…
 
I have to say, I do love Jim’s choice of domain name here! That’s awesome.
Read Installing Ghost on Reclaim Hosting (Reclaim Hosting Community)
Node has been updated and I was able to install the latest version of Ghost (3.0.2).
Perhaps I can leverage a bit of these instructions to get the Node.JS version of TiddlyWiki working on my own domain?
First, we’ll start off by making the humble presumption that you’ve got your own domain and an install of WordPress running on it. Hopefully this covers most attendees.

(If it doesn’t there are lots of options: You could do something similar a bit more manually if you like using WordPress.com. You’ve also got a great community of people who could help you to better own your online identity and domain right here! I’ll bet our friends at Reclaim Hosting could help as well.)

Read Announcing THATCamp retrospective and sunsetting by Amanda French (thatcamp.org)
The first THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) was held at the Center for History and New Media (now the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) at George Mason University in the summer of 2008 (back when Flickr was a big deal — click the above screenshot to browse THATCamp photos on Flickr). I wrote a fair amount about how THATCamp first came to be and how it was turned into a larger initiative in a 2013 talk called “On Projects, and THATCamp.” Nearly seven years later, I’m still proud of THATCamp; I think it has been a model of sustainability among grant-funded projects, and I think it did a great deal to demystify the digital humanities and digital methods more generally for a whole generation of scholars and information professionals. The number of registered THATCamps has grown from 170 when I wrote that talk in 2013 to (my goodness) over 320 events today, a phenomenon that has taken place without a single full-time THATCamp employee, with just a dedicated distributed community and the hosting support of staff members at RRCHNM and Reclaim Hosting. The WordPress Multisite instance on thatcamp.org has 11,803 users, and while it’s true that several hundred of those might be spam or inactive users, I think that’s still impressive.
Replied to LA Roadshow Recap by Jim GroomJim Groom (bavatuesdays)

10 days ago I was sitting in a room in Los Angeles with 12 other folks listening to Marie SelvanadinSundi Richard, and Adam Croom talk about work they’re doing with Domains, and it was good! That session was followed by Peter Sentz providing insight on how BYU Domains provides and supports top-level domains and hosting for over 10,000 users on their campus. And first thing that Friday morning Lauren and I kicked the day off by highlighting Tim Clarke’s awesome work with the Berg Builds community directory as well as Coventry Domains‘s full-blown frame for a curriculum around Domains with Coventry Learn. In fact, the first 3 hours of Day 2 were a powerful reminder of just how much amazing work is happening at the various schools that are providing the good old world wide web as platform to their academic communities. 

https://roadshow.reclaimhosting.com/LA/

I’m still bummed I couldn’t make it to this event…

One of the questions that came up during the SPLOT workshop is if there’s a SPLOT for podcasting, which reminded me of this post Adam Croom wrote a while back about his podcasting workflow: “My Podcasting Workflow with Amazon S3.” . We’re always on the look-out for new SPLOTs to bring to the Reclaim masses, and it would be cool to have an example that moves beyond WordPress just to make the point a SPLOT is not limited to WordPress (as much as we love it) —so maybe Adam and I can get the band back together.

I just outlined a tiny and relatively minimal/free way to host and create a podcast feed last night: https://boffosocko.com/2019/12/17/55761877/

I wonder if this could be used to create a SPLOT that isn’t WordPress based potentially using APIs from the Internet Archive and Huffduffer? WordPress-based infrastructure could be used to create it certainly and aggregation could be done around tags. It looks like the Huffduffer username SPLOT is available.
–annotated December 17, 2019 at 10:46AM

Read Reclaim Your Domain LA Hackathon Wrap-up by Kin Lane (kinlane.com)
I spent the weekend hacking away with a small group of very smart folks, at the Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon in Los Angeles. Fifteen of us gathered at Pepperdine University in west LA, looking to move forward the discussion around what we call “Reclaim Your Domain”.
An interesting list of people in the DoOO/IndieWeb space in/formerly in the LA area.

Michael Berman – California State University Channel Islands (@amichaelberman)
Chris Mattia – California State University Channel Islands (@cmmattia)
Mikhail Gershovich – Vocat (@mgershovich)
Rolin Moe – Pepperdine (@RMoeJo)

A bit curious that for a reclaim the web event around DoOO that he highlights their Twitter presence rather than their own websites. Potentially for lack of notifications/webmention functionality?
–December 17, 2019 at 08:49AM

Once again I am reminded of the importance of API 101 demos, and how I need to focus more in this area.

I’d love to see a list of API 101 demos. This would be particularly cool if there were a DS106-esque site for content like this. Examples can be powerful things.
–December 17, 2019 at 08:57AM

Lastly, I walked through Github Pages, and how using a separate branch, you can publish HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON for projects, turning Github into not just a code and content management platform, but also a publishing endpoint.

More information on how to use GitHub pages to build your website: https://indieweb.org/GitHub_Pages
–December 17, 2019 at 08:59AM

🎧 Tom Woodward | Gettin’ Air with Terry Green | voicEd

Listened to Tom Woodward | Gettin' Air with Terry Green from voiced.ca
Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) is Associate Director of Innovation in the @VCUALTLab. We chat about the awesome things that can happen when great educational technologists like Tom get to work with great educators. A few of those things are anth101.com, photographyismagic.com, and oh the 34,200 blogs at rampages.us!

I feel robbed that Terry Greene only published the first half an hour of what would assuredly been an epic 10 hour discussion. Suppose I’ll just have to be content with reading Tom Woodward’s blog cover to cover and scouring the web for video that features him.
Read cPanel unleashes price hikes on its most dense customers by Richard SpeedRichard Speed (The Register)
Yeah - because hardware is better these days, we're going to need to charge you more. Much, much more...
cPanel has dropped a bombshell on its customers with a price hike for its services that has left some running for the door marked exit.
This must be why I saw Tim tweet this a few days ago: