Bava moves to Kinsta, story at 11

Posted on March 12, 2020 by Reverend

It’s been surreal here in Northern Italy, and the last thing the world needs right now is another hot take on the Corona Virus or teaching online in the age of pandemics. My turn over the least 10 years has been to explore new (and old) web-based environments possible for teaching and learning, and frankly the syndicated, asynchronous and distributed learning environment sounds pretty good right about now. Throw in some radio, and it is near on perfect 🙂

But I profess and digress, but at least it’s not on Twitter. The point of this post is simply to chronicle my migration of this blog from Digital Ocean (DO) to Kinsta yesterday. I created the DO droplet back in January and documented the process (find the blog posts here, here, here, and here). I learn a ton from these projects and WordPress continues to be the tool I use and learn about the web through the lens of. I recognize the limitations therein, but that said I only have so much emotional labor to spare! So when I was doing a migration from Kinsta to Reclaim Hosting I became really intrigued by Kinsta’s model, to quickly re-iterate here they provide container-based WordPress instances, and their service is built on top of Google’s Cloud platform.

They provide what they call “premium” WordPress hosting, which comes at a price. At the lowest end of the spectrum it costs $30 per month, which is as much as a year’s hosting at Reclaim—and we even throw in a domain. But they aren’t really geared towards the same audience, they are positioned to serve folks how have a site that needs to scale resources seamlessly for both traffic spikes and quick growth. Like I said in my previous post, it reminds me of a dead-simple, elastic Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC-2 instance for those who don’t have the sysadmin chops but need to run a beefy, mission critical WordPress instance. But like AWS, resources come at a premium, but I’ll talk about that later on in this post.

For now let me focus on the migration and Kinsta’s stellar support. I actually tried to migrate the bava from my DO instance two days ago, but I ran into issues because my Kinsta container runs over port 51135, and I could not cleanly move a zipped up copy of my files between servers. The following was the command I used when logged into my DO server, but I kept getting connection errors. Below is a stripped version of the scp command I used

scp -P 51135 [email protected]:/www/bavatuesdays/public /www/bava/html.zip

I jumped on chat support* and I was almost immediately answered by Ruby who told me there may be issues with my DO instance blocking port 51135, which turned out to be correct, I just was not smart enough to open it. Given the bava is almost 9 GB of files, SFTP is out of the questions given with my current upload speed it would take 12+ hours. Whereas a scp between servers takes literally minutes for a 9 GB zip file. I left things alone for the day as work at Reclaim started to gear up, but returned to it yesterday early with the idea of  actually moving the instance of bavatuesdays I had on Reclaim servers before migrating in January. This would have almost all the same files save anything uploaded after mid-January, which is an easy fix. I unblocked port 51135 on the old server and tried the scp command to the Kinsta container and it worked, 9 GB moved in 6 minutes. 

That was awesome, but when I tried unzipping the directory on Kinsta’s server I was getting disconnected from the server:

I jumped on the chat support, and Ruby once again bailed me out suggested I use the external Ip address for this rather than the internal given it is often more table. Boom, that worked. I was able to swap out the images I was missing since January, and my site was now on Kinsta. A few things I really appreciated was dead simple SSL cert and forcing of SSL through the tools panel:

After that, I tried upgrading to PHP 7.4, and that was dead simple too, all seemed to work, but the WordPress debugging tool showed me there was an issue with the Crayon Syntax Highlighter plugin for anything above PHP 7.2 (it was actually breaking any post with it embedded, which is annoying) so I reverted to 7.2 for now, but I should know better than to use plugins 4 years out of date. I am pointing my domain from my Reclaim cPanel, so no need for Kinsta’s DNS controls, but always interesting to see how they handle that:

Using Amazon Route 53, just like Reclaim, and I might have to add a domain to see how the controls look, and I do like the Gmail MX records radio button given that would, I imagine, pre-fill the records given they’re predictable, and be entirely out of the email game is a beautiful thing! 

Kinsta has built-in caching for sites (need to look more into the details behind that) and they also have a CDN tool, something I’ve never used on the bava, so I wanted to try that out to see if it speeds things up. Now, it is kinda of a joke to say that because speeding my site up means getting it to load under 4 seconds given I load images on heavy, and I never get a rating above D from Pingdom’s speed tester, but I am feeling the site is a bit snappier regardless 😉 

So, I got caching, CDN loading, and the like. Now when I moved to Kinsta I was un-phased by there 20,000 unique hits limit for the $30 plan given I average about 100-200 daily hits on the bava according to Jetpack—I’m not as big in Japan as I once was 🙂 But this morning when I checked the site recorded over 2200+ unique visits, even though Jetpack recorded 165. That’s a pretty big discrepancy.

What’s more I was transferring 2.5 GB of data in less than a day? Who knew?! At this rate I will hit my 20K visits limit in less than 10 days (versus the 30 I am allotted) bumping it up to $60 per month for 40,000 unique visits—and at this rate I would even hit more than that, pushing me into the $100 Business plan range. Yowzers! I was interested in where all the traffic was coming from, and it is bizarre, as you can imagine. All I can say to all you traffic hounds out there is make more GIFs! 🙂

My high-res Apocalypse Now GIF from 2011 was hit 56 times and required a whopping 755 MB of bandwidth.

God the bava is unsustainable! But even more surprising is the following image of the Baltimore Police Department putting guns and money on the table being hit over 1400 times in less than 24 hours! WTF! wire106 #4life

It is a strange world, but getting these insights from Kinsta’s analytics is kinda cool, and it reminds me that the bava is its own repository of weirdness outside the social media silos—“ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” I still have to get my SSH keys set, which I discovered is possible…

Oh yeah, one more thing. I was also concerned about hitting my storage limits given my plan limits me to 10 GB, and when I did a df -h it looked like I was using 13GBs. 

I jumped on support again, this time with Salvador, and he also ruled—their support is super solid, which is always a good sign. He gave me a different command to run in www, namely…

du -h -d 4 

Which gave me what I needed, 9.2 GBs, just under the wire:

And now I need to find a way to offload some of the media serving given it will quickly make Kinsta prohibitive in terms of costs, but I have thoroughly enjoyed their dashboard, and the laser-like focus of  creating an entire hosted, optimized experience  and environment for one tool.

*Kinsta uses Intercom for online chat support, which is a tool Reclaim had for about a year or two in 2015 and 2016 I believe. We did chat support when it was Tim, myself, and Lauren, that was our team! It was hard, and the chat format invited folks to add 3 word issues like “My site broke” or “HELP me please!” Just the thing every support agent wants to see 🙂 I was mindful of this and tried to be kind and give details and be patient, but the on-demand model can be rough. And I know folks are thinking of that as one way to imagine managing stuff online in times of crisis, but if Reclaim’s experience with chat is at all telling, resist the urge!  That said, Ruby and Salvador were there and helped and I appreciated it tremendously, so who knows. But my gut tells me if you have not done web hosting support for the last 10 years and are not prepared with definitive questions and have done your own troubleshooting you are in for a world of back-and-forth pain

Posted in bavatuesdays, reclaim, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Kinsta: Container-based WordPress Hosting

Posted on March 9, 2020 by Reverend

One of the benefits of doing migrations for Reclaim Hosting internauts is getting to see how different hosting companies operate. Many use cPanel which is familiar territory for us at Reclaim, but ever so often you come across some pretty different dashboard, such as Dreamhost. But recently I got a peek at the Kinsta user dashboard, and it definitely smacks of a next-generation hosting environment. 

So what do I mean by that? Well, it is container-driven hosting infrastructure run on top of Google’s Cloud. Given you effectively lease your own container as server, they’re not providing shared hosting at all, but rather isolated, scalable hosting environments. While Kinsta has limited their offering to WordPress,* what they’re doing could be imagined beyond any one app—albeit with the accompanying complexity of managing numerous container images. What’s more, they have optimized their environment for speed and elastically scale for intensive resourcing needs. It’s like AWS with a dead-simple user interface that assumes someone else will be managing all the disparate pieces.  Here is a look at the Dashboard that highlights resource usage. Notice the 3 important data points are visits, Content Delivery Network (CDN) usage, and disk usage:

Kinsta has their own Content Delivery Network built into their product, which helps with site load times. Having it baked-in means your clients will not need to use Cloudflare, or similar tools. They also have slick backup/restore options similar to Digital Ocean’s:

In fact, the interface in general reminds me a lot of Digital Ocean’s: simple, sparse, and easy-to-use. I was also struck by the way they abstract things out that would otherwise be lost in a sea of icons in cPanel, such as SSL certificates and forcing https. And then there are things you could never do on shared hosting like restarting PHP. Additionally, you have WordPress specific tools like site caching, debugging, and a search and replace for the database:

What’s more, you can also abstract out the WordPress plugins into the Kinsta dashboard to get a quick look at version numbers and what plugins have and have not been upgraded:

Not sure this is all that much more convenient than the WordPress admin area, but the idea of abstracting out pieces of the application and integrating them into the hosting user dashboard is interesting. 

We’ve been thinking a lot about what a next generation hosting environment for both our shared hosting and Domains schools might look like, and that exercise is a powerful lesson in thinking through your user interface experience. All driven by the question: “How can we abstract the things our users depend on from tools like WHM and WHMCS to create a more simplified, focused web hosting tool?” One that remains tricky is thinking through user management and billing, so always interesting to see these things baked in the the dashboard.

Probably the two biggest differences between Kinsta and cPanel-based shared hosting services like Reclaim Hosting are options and pricing. Kinsta is designed for WordPress exclusively, and it appeals to folks who want to optimize it for higher traffic demands. This is not a sandbox, although you can run a development environment alongside your production environment. You pay $30 a month for the lowest plan which includes 1 WordPress site and up to 20,000 monthly visitors. While more expensive than most shared hosting options, which is understandable, it is on par with the cost of setting up a 4GB or 8 GB droplet on Digital Ocean to run your WordPress site with weekly backups (something I do currently). I am considering moving my site again to Kinsta to get a sense of the differences, and explore a bit more what it ‘s like as a customer to work within a mass market container-based infrastructure provider—something that definitely intrigues me. Kinsta has, from what I can see on a cursory glance, done a pretty impressive job with just that. 

I think Kinsta points to the possible emergence of a different market than Digital Ocean, AWS, and similar cloud-based infrastructure companies (one actually built on top of them, much like Kinsta is built on top of Google Cloud). While these companies appeal to developers who can and will spin up their own servers an then take the time to setup a wide range of environments (whether container-based or more old gold LAMP stack stuff) to install an application, Kinsta does all that for you. It’s container-based WordPress hosting made simple, while also providing some options for folks who want a bit more such as SSH access, SFTP, etc. The fact it is a container provides more freedom in that regard, but I wonder where the limits lie. For example, I can’t imagine you change PHP versions, which is probably a good thing,  but I’d be interested to find out more. Anyway, here’s to moving the bava yet again in the name of progress and learning  🙂

*Which with 30% + of all websites is a decent-sized market to target, I mean the majority of Reclaimers also use WordPress.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Learning, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Reclaim Arcade: Game Pick-ups, Living Rooms, Frosty Brew Thru, and Utah Arcades

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Reverend

My time back in Virginia, Utah and New York several weeks ago was jam-packed with work. In fact, my old bones are still recovering. Not only did I get a chance to attend the ever stellar UniversityAPI conference in Provo, Utah (more on that in my next post), but I also got to spend a lot of dedicated time working on Reclaim Arcade, which is quickly becomes like those objects in the sideview mirror that are far closer than they appear. As Tim the weekend before, I spent a lot of time driving to pickup video games. I went to King, North Carolina to pickup an all-time favorite of mine, a stand-up version of Gyruss.* And I have the picture of a high score to prove it:

219,500

The following weekend I drove to a suburb of Pittsburgh to pickup Street Fight II Championship Edition. It was a bit of trucking, but I enjoyed it—especially when I’m hauling an 80s arcade treasure in the trunk.

Between these two road trips there was shopping to do in preparation for Reclaim Arcade’s first official public appearance at the Frosty Brew Thru in Fredericksburg. I hit the jackpot on the first try at the Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in the strip mall right next to ours. I came across a couch combo that even rivals the original living room sofa at UMW.

The haul

Bones of the living room

And $200 later we have the bones of Reclaim Arcade’s living room. We got the coffee and side tables on Facebook a week earlier, and with the couch set we were in very good shape. The last piece was some shelving and a rug, both of  which we also found at ReStore. And like that we have the living room console 2.0 in less than two days, I have to say I was shocked how quickly, cheaply, and quite frankly perfectly this came together.

Console Living Room 2.0

The rug is the only piece I would change right now, and if I can get my hands on a primo furniture TV piece the shelves can be re-purposed, but all-in-all I am very happy with this setup. Even the $10 lamp is perfect with the heavy-duty, plastic corrugated shade replete with a cigarette smoke-stained patina. It’s damn good! And all this was done by Thursday (I flew in Monday evening), just in time for us to head over to the Fredericksburg Fairgrounds the following day and setup for the Frosty Brew Thru.

Frosty Brew Thru Setup

Living Room Pre-show

Frosty Brew Thru Setup

One of the things we quickly learned from the Frosty Brew Thru is that moving six OG 80s arcade games and two pinball machines, not to mention a full blown living room setup, is no small order. Tim has become a pro at moving arcade machines, and we’ve invested in a serial appliance dolly to lighten the load, but there’s no getting around the fact that one of these things can be a royal pain in the ass to move, no less eight. That was good to experience though, because it quickly dissuaded Tim and I from planning any other short-lived pop-up events before we open. And while it was a lot of work for a one-day event, it was fun to feature a few gems from our collection such as Centipede (our very first), Ms Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Joust, X-men, Mortal Kombat II, and our newer pinball acquisitions Stranger Things and Ghostbusters.

DK in Action

X-men

Reclaim Arcade Living Room Test-run

Pinball is all the rage

More than anything though, people’s reactions to both the living room and the games were very, very encouraging. This is why we are doing this whole thing, we want to create a cool place in Fredericksburg for folks to hang out, and the reaction throughout the day reminded us what all the work is for. And it is worth noting Meredith took time out of her weekend to join us throughout the day—reclaim4life.

Fix it Again, Timmy

Another important thing we realized, which is a topic we would come back to during our tour of arcade bars in Utah, was that even with some of our newest and most mint games, stuff stops working. In particular we were having issues throughout the day with the coin mechs, and we quickly had nightmare visions of running around Reclaim Arcade refunding tokens and quarters all day. At the end of the day the Frosty Brew Thru was a good opportunity to get the idea of Reclaim Arcade out locally, get a realistic sense of  the overhead of pop-up events like this, reaffirm our raison d’être for starting Reclaim Arcade, as well as an opportunity to kick the tires on what the day-to-day might be like. So all-in-all it was very much worth it, and despite being exhausted the next day (Sunday) saw me driving at 4 AM to Pittsburgh to get a Street Fighter II machine, no pleasure but arcade pain.

Mint Moon Patrol in SLC

That Tuesday we headed out for Utah to attend the uAPI conference as mentioned above, but we also took the time to visit a couple of arcade bars in the area. The first night we headed to Quarters in Salt Lake City, which was a full bar with no food. The games took actual quarters (I guess they would have to with a name like that) and the selection was decent. I appreciated how mint the classic 80s arcade games were though. Their Moon Patrol was gorgeous (and the Pavement song playing in the background was nice), it’s high on the list of Reclaim Arcade acquisitions …

Moon Patrol from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

I also noticed their Missile Command was quite beautiful. The screen really popped, and it made Tim and I go more closely over our machines after we got back to Freddy.

Missile Command from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

But while their games were in good shape, the selection of 80s arcade games was lacking. I think of the 25 OG arcade games they had, maybe 8 of them would have made the “Jim Groom Cut”: Asteroids, Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong, Ms Pac-man, Missile Command, TNMT, X-Men, Robocop (though that is more sentimental than gameplay), and maybe, maybe Contra (although on playing that again I much prefer Ikari Warriors). I can’t really speak to the Pinballs given that is not my strength, but they had a good-sized collection, including Iron Maiden, Twilight Zone, and others. So that might be a big draw for folks. It had a Killer Queen game, which Tim and I are still trying to wrap our heads around, but so far it is not something we’re interested in.

Quarters Arcade Bar in SLC

It was first and foremost a bar with arcade games, and it had a bunch of spaces for folks to hang out as well, there was foosball, Skeeball, and an area for older consoles. It even looked like they were building out a stage-like space for performances, but I’m not positive about that. They had a bunch of room in their basement dwelling and used it pretty well, but at the end of the day it felt more like a bar than anything else, which is something I want to avoid at Reclaim Arcade. The real takeaway for me, though, was the condition of their games, they were tight and were able to run a fully automated cash business on the games alone, and in the two hours we were there we didn’t lose a quarter or see a game out of order—that is definitely something worth noting. The games at the Circuit in Richmond were not nearly as well taken care of in my experience.

Flynn's Retrocade

After the uAPI conference ended Tim and I decided to take a road trip from Provo to Roy, Utah to visit another arcade in the Salt Lake area, namely Flynn’s Retrocade. It’s interesting to me how different the various arcades popping up truly are. For example, Flynn’s was an arcade first and foremost, there was no alcohol or food (they can order a pizza for you that gets delivered) and they bill themselves as an arcade and soda bar. They had a fairly unremarkable selection of pinball machines, but their 80s arcade cabinets were awesome. It was a very impressive selection and, like Quarters, the games were in very good shape.

A fine collection in Utah

The space was very similar to what Tim and I first imagined Reclaim Arcade being: a strip mall storefront with games lining either wall all the way back.

Scenes from a Reclaim Arcade

Scenes from a Reclaim Arcade

Our vision has evolved a bit since then, but it was interesting to see how Flynn’s did this. I loved their attention to detail, the Han Solo doormat as you enter was a good example of this:

Han Solo rug at Flynn's Retrocade

Not to mention the ceramic tiles designed like a Pac-man maze. Very cool!

Ready!

They also had some nice neon signs that I have some ideas for Reclaim Arcade. But at the end of the day the games were everything. There list was impressive: Robotron, Starwars Cockpit, Empire Strikes Back, Pooyan (a personal favorite), Defender, Dragon’s Lair,† Ms Pac-man, Centipede, Asteroids, Popeye, Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Track and Field, Frogger, Q*bert, Paperboy (realizing this is a must-have), 1943,  Super Punch-Out, Dig Dug, Moon Patrol, Millipede, Rootbeer tapper, etc. You can see a full list here, but I noticed there was no Major Havoc which I wanted to try. Maybe I am biased about this list because we already have a good number of these games, in fact we are only missing Paperboy (essential), Pooyan (yes, please!), Dragon’s Lair (I’m in no rush on this anymore), Frogger (we should have this), Moon Patrol (want it), Empire Strikes Back (no real rush, it is not nearly as good as Star Wars), a Tapper machine (we want one, but they’re pretty expensive) and 1943 (still on the fence). So, all-in-all this collection was probably the closest to ours I have seen, and having them all in the same room was awesome.

Pooyan Control Panel

Pooyan from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

Jounrey

Popeye

We did pick-up a Star Wars vector game since this trip, but it is not a cockpit, but given the price and how tight a fit the cockpit was for me I am not complaining. I still want one, but that can wait.

The Much Sought-after Starwars Cockpit

One of the things that was really useful about this visit as well was re-playing games like Dragon’s Lair and Empire Strikes Back and being reminded they may not be worth the money. Not to mention playing other games I had forgotten all about, such as RoadBlasters.

Roadblasters

This is a fun game, and I would definitely add it to the list. Whereas the sequel to Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, was not very good at all, and it will save me an uninformed impulse buy:

Ghouls 'N Ghosts

I was also underwhelmed with Contra and Super Pacman. Whereas I dug a game I never played before, Astro Blaster:

Astro Blaster

So, all in all it was really useful fieldwork for Reclaim Arcade, but I think the biggest thing Tim and I got out of this visit was re-considering having our arcade machines use tokens or quarters. We had just assumed this would be how things work, but after the headache of mechs at the Frosty Brew Thru and thinking through how Flynn’s only had one person working who took your money and then you played as much as you wanted we began to re-consider.

Flynn's Retrocade

The idea of an admission fee for folks became quickly appealing when we started to think how much overhead this could save us not only in chasing down lost quarters and tokens, but it also would prove a boon for renting out the space for private parties. Switching games from accepting quarters or tokens to free-play is not trivial, it takes hours and hours of work, and if party rentals become a thing we want to avoid giving out endless tokens, not to mention the savings on actually buying tokens, fixing coin door mechs, and providing change machines, which do not come cheap. As we left Flynn’s we became increasingly convinced that having a flat-fee for playing the games, and leaving all the 80s arcade cabinets on free-play may be the way to go. We drove back to Provo discussing as much, and I have to say the dreaming about the possibilities of Reclaim Arcade is half the fun for me.

DKjr

RallyX Cocktail from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

The next day we parted ways, Tim back to Virginia and me on my next leg of the trip to visit family and pick-up more arcade games. My brother did me a solid and grabbed a Donkey Kong Jr and a cocktail RallyX I had tracked down on Long Island. I think a part of him enjoyed it, though he would never let on as much. All I heard was, “When are you gonna get them out of my garage, Jimmy!” Not an easy chore when you are in Italy 🙂 So, for anyone counting that is 4 on this trip, and I had a fifth in my sights (a cocktail Pengo in Allentown Pennsylvania) but I just ran out of room in the truck and I couldn’t pay via PayPal, which meant I would have to get cash, something a prefer to avoid.  I still want the Pengo cocktail, but I guess we’ll see.

The Upside-down

Can you diagnose the problem and prescribe a fix?
I just so happened to be invited to a Super Bowl party (it was a good one this year) hosted and attended by some age-old friends from elementary, middle, and high school on Long Island, and I couldn’t resist taking them out to the car to show them what I would be hauling to Virginia the next day. The reaction was a mix of pity and mild interest for my health 🙂 So, family visit done, games loaded, Super Bowl watched, and now the drive back to Freddy from Long Island with just two more full days to go before I am back on the plane abroad.

The Hitcher

The Hitcher on VHS

I have to admit I spent some of the time recovering in the living room watching The Hitcher on VHS. I also had a lot of fun watching our first donation to Reclaim Video, Strange Brew, thanks to Tim Clarke. Tim is amazing not just because he rules as an instructional technologist at Muhlenberg College, but also because he has amazing taste in VHS tapes. Strange Brew was even more relevant than I remember given the whole plot revolves around a video game cabinet doubling as a surveillance tape/hard drive that foils the sinister master brewer’s evil plot to take over the world. Did you remember that? I didn’t!

So, that was fun. But the last order of business was a check-in with Spaces, the design firm locally in Fredericksburg that is helping us design the space of Reclaim Arcade. We spent Wednesday morning looking over the plans and talking about the details and I have to say if I had any doubts up-and-until that point, I was quickly convinced that Reclaim Arcade is going to be legend!

Recalim Arcade Design Development

I’ll save the details for another post given I should probably spend some time talking through the broader design of the space, but when I saw the specifics and we discussed the project both broadly and specifically I was convinced we are creating something really, really special. And I have been riding on that high ever since. The work is real, and we’re starting to feel the time crunch, but we knew what was ahead of us, and Tim Owens is a machine that won’t stop, can’t stop until everything is perfect. That’s why we rule! Avanti Reclaim!

*It really is a brilliantly designed game, and I also bought a cocktail version of this game for personal use given I am getting old and need to sit down more often while playing 🙂

† Admittedly it has atrocious gameplay, but the laserdisc graphics still hold a draw. But after trying it out here I would have to say it is near-on impossible to actually play it, and I would think twice before buying this or Space Ace. They play much better on the iOS, frankly.

Posted in Reclaim Arcade, video games | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Thinking about Mentorship

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Reverend

As this last day or two might suggest, I have finally started to settle in after a few weeks of travel. It’s not only been busy on the Reclaim Hosting front, per usual, but the intensity around Reclaim Arcade is ramping up. That project deserves its own blog post and then some, but suffice to say we are just two months away from our projected opening date, and what little hair I have left is currently endangered 🙂 It also takes me longer and longer to re-enter after a long stint away. My manic depression is particularly unstable when I find myself away from home for extended periods of time, so I have to pay more attention to that reality given it is one of the few hiccups I’ve consistently run into in an otherwise peaceful and balanced season of my life. But once I get back on the blog I know things are starting to settle down a bit, which makes me happy. Also, extended weekend getaways to Alto Adige for hiking and snowboarding never hurts my outlook on things either.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B83rZY2Ihrd/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B86bhHzI42U/

But I digress. I’ve been trying to actually write about my experience at the OE Global conference in Milan this past November, which was awesome for catching-up with friends old and new. I always relish the time I get to spend listening to Tom Woodward talk about the work he’s doing, and the site he created to share the tiny teaching tools he cranks out for VCU for his workshop is an absolute goldmine that I should have shared much sooner. 

Alas, world enough and time, but this post is testament it’s never too late. It was also awesome to catch up with my Swedish connection Jörg Pareigis who co-presented with Tom, it’s like we were back in Karlstadt having fika! Another highlight was sitting in on a session alongside Tom, Anne-Marie Scott, and Terry Greene listening to Jim Luke talk about the commons—it is a compelling framework for trying to make sense of open presently. But something I have been coming back to again and again is something Brian Lamb said while we were jumping from bar to bar trying to figure out a way to get one more last call before last call. Brian is always good at making me chew on things for a while, and during our far-ranging discussion about edtech (because whenever we are together we spend some fun time kicking the tires on that lemon) the idea of mentorship came up. In particular, and I am paraphrasing from an unreliable memory here, the question around whether or not folks of a certain age are doing the work of mentoring a new generation of edtechs.

It’s always hard for me to think of myself as “of certain age” (to quote Antonella) but I know, in retrospect, how crucial folks like D’Arcy Norman, Brian Lamb, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Zach Davis, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, Jerry Slezak, Gardner Campbell, Jon Udell, Alan Levine, Mike Caulfield, Tom Woodward and Matt Gold to name just a few have been while I was getting my feet in edtech. All those folks were crucial in their own way in helping me get a better sense of the field and what was (and was not) important. I remember arrogantly poking fun at blogging to Matt Gold in 2004, only to be an avid blogger myself in 2005. Or in 2004 when Zach Davis told me to read Stephen Downes’s blog if I wanted to get a sense of the field in order to get hired as an Instructional Technology Fellow at CUNY. Zach and Luke also got me up and running with my first WordPress site for a faculty member in 2004/2005 at Hunter College. Then there was Mikhail who helped me figure out photoshop and video compression as we played the role of blogfathers in early 2005. Or how D’Arcy Norman showed me how to blog about WordPress through his blogging about Drupal. Or the way in which Martha modeled working with faculty and truly theorizing the value of a toolbox like cPanel for edtech. Or when Brian himself linked to a post I wrote on the Abject during the early days of the bava which helped me realize the field was not simply limited to a physical office on a campus in Virginia. Woodward was simply up for anything remotely fun and that was awesome. Or when Gardner said just about anything. I could do this all day because, in fact, I enjoy doing it because the folks who got me excited about the possibilities of edtech changed my life, and I really love them for that. 

So, the question that Brian asked at a bar in Milan has stuck with me. What am I doing to get the next generation of edtechs equally excited about the field—warts and all. I think ds106 was good moment for that given I think I was briefly a mentor to Tim, but he quickly outshined me in every element of the job so I had to, in turn, become his mentee so I could learn how Domain of One’s Own might actually be created. It’s only gotten worse since then 🙂 But, I want to believe that Tim and I have tried to play this role with the folks at Reclaim Hosting, but before Brian raised the question I am not sure I was all that intentional about it. My logic being I have so many real and readily apparent faults that playing the role of mentor to anyone would be a fraud. I still believe this, but I also think it’s time to be more intentional with not only my learning but also my sharing and championing of folks coming up in the field. I can only play the hits for so long, right Brian? 🙂 So anyway, this month will try and be a return to form of featuring and championing some of the folks that have inspired me, in particular Lauren and Meredith at Reclaim Hosting, and even before that as students at UMW—they have ruled for near on 7 or 8 years in and out of the classroom. And more recently Lauren Heywood’s unbelievable awesome work with Coventry Learn—it has been a big inspiration for our own rethinking of DoOO at Reclaim Hosting, and I can’t thank her enough for being so generous with her work!

So, anyway, thanks Brian for continuing to push me to get over myself and look at the bigger picture, how can edtech be all bad if it brought you into my life you crazy bastard?! Don’t answer that anyone!

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Migrating WordPress without Access to Database or Core Files

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Reverend

One of the things I have been doing a lot of at Reclaim Hosting these days while the US sleeps is migrating accounts. We have a steady flow of fine folks moving to Reclaim, and one of the things we do is help them bring their content and domains along smoothly.

The other morning I ran into a situation wherein I couldn’t access either the database or core files of a WordPress site I was migrating so I went looking for a solution.* And while I was considering the Duplicator plugin, I was a bit wary given the recent exploit. Tim and Lauren pointed me to the All-in-One WP Migration plugin which was exactly what I needed.

The free version allows you to move both database and files of a site up to 515 MB. This worked for one of the two sites I was migrating, but the second was 518MB so I needed to access a premium addon plugin to finish the job. The add-on plugin allows for unlimited size downloads, and also allows you to upload the backup file the plugin creates via FTP so you can restore it directly from the plugin interface. I preferred this method because uploading the file via the web often runs in PHP upload size errors and timeout issues that often draw out the process unnecessarily, whereas the unlimited add-on plugin simplifies the process for big sites saving me a fair amount of time.

The All-in-One WP Migration plugin is a good plugin to have in your WordPress tool belt if you want a clean migration that takes all database settings, plugins, and themes and seamlessly migrates them to another WordPress site hosted elsewhere. I usually default to doing this with a MySQL export and an archive of core files, but if you find yourself without access to either (or not sure on how that process works manually), this plugin is an excellent option. I have not tried it on a WPMS site, yet but I think that would be the next logical step given getting core files and a database export for WPMS is far more involved process than a stand alone WordPress site. Anyone have experience on that front? Either way, it might be a good weekend experiment as I prepare for the #reclaimWP March madness..

*Although truth be told I could–but that is another story.

Posted in plugins, reclaim, Reclaim Learning, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Back to the Fundamentals of the Web

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Reverend

The Reclaim Hosting team is gearing up for the OER20 Conference happening in London on April 1st and 2nd (Corona Virus allowing). As part of our proposed sponsorship of the conference this year we wanted to run an in-depth, hands-on workshop for beginner and intermediate internauts on various elements of how the Web works within a LAMP server environment. The curriculum was imagined in partnership with Coventry University’s extraordinary learning technologist Lauren Heywood (the brains behind the brilliant Coventry Learn).

The day-long workshop will offer participants a look at how DNS works, the basics of the FTP protocol, various uses and abuses of command line, file management, editing basic HTML and PHP code, as well as dissecting how database-driven applications work. All attendees with be provided their own sandbox server environment to work within, and each part of the workshop will provide an overview of the technology followed by a hands-on activity that will put theory into action!

The event will be held at Coventry University on March 31st, the day before OER20 kicks off. Please keep in mind Coventry is an hour train ride from London, so plan accordingly before registering. Speaking of which, there is a £75 registration fee that will go directly towards sponsoring ALT—the good folks that run this amazing conference. So, not only could you learn a thing or two about how the web works, but you will also be supporting the good folks that run OER.*

So, if this sounds interesting to you, do us all a favor and register for the workshop directly.

*What’s more, if no one registers then Reclaim might actually have to give them money! 

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Intentional Learning at Reclaim Hosting: Back to the bava Basics or, Blogging about WordPress

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Reverend

A blog title so long it might as well be a tweet….but it’s not, it’s a god-damned BLOG! I’M BLOGGING, HOLD ALL MY CALLS!!!

Feel the burn, THE BLOG BURN! 

So, I got that out of the way, but it is a reflection of how fired up I am these days. Let me start by saying that Reclaim Hosting has been pretty awesome. Meredith has stepped into the role of Support Manager brilliantly, and Lauren continues to rule as Director of Operations, add to that our part-time support hire last Spring, Chris Blankenship, who has become the systems administrator Tim and I have been dreaming of! And just a few short months ago we got lucky enough to bring on Gordon Hawley has come to us with decades of support experience in the field and has fit-in seamlessly and proved to be an immediate win. What’s more, we recently hired soon-to-be UMW alum Kathryn Hartraft on a part-time basis, and she is proving why UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center is ground zero for recruiting fresh Reclaim talent. I am not gonna lie, the gritty and grounded UMW students have been an absolute boon to Reclaim Hosting since the beginning, and I am feeling ever more confident that they can run the ship without Tim and I—they are that good! 

It’s been rewarding to see the team congeal so well over the past two months, and I think that has given all of us room to start becoming more pro-active about filling in gaps we have in our collective knowledge. Out of which the idea of a more intentional learning program at Reclaim has emerged. The idea is simple: we take a topic for an entire month and recommend various readings and tasks around that theme, and folks are then expected to explore it and then narrate their learning on their blog. For example, in January we focused on migrations (a chore I have become all too familiar with these days) and this month has been dedicated to file and directory structures in cPanel. In fact, last night we had our first meeting with the entire team in a long while in order to reflect upon and wrap-up February’s learning, while at the same time introducing the next month’s topic. Meredith brilliantly wrapped up the month on file structures with a discussion around what we learned in the first hour, and I introduced the coming topic for March: all things WordPress! 

As usual I was ill-prepared for anything formal, so I basically tried to reinforce the fact that despite the haterz, WordPress still rulez! And while it only powers 35% of all sites on the web, that figure is closer to 90% of Reclaim Hosting’s users. So being familiar with the ins-and-outs of WordPress is a must for our team. It doesn’t hurt that I cut my teeth on WordPress and it has been very, very good to me over the years. I often think beyond marrying Antonella or teaming up with Tim as a business partner, choosing WordPress over Drupal was the best decision I ever made 🙂 What’s more, I spent many, many years on this blog trying to get folks in higher ed to take it seriously as a viable alternative to the LMS. In fact, bavatuesdays was one of WordPress’s earliest and most passionate promoters, and as is often the case I wasn’t wrong 🙂

So, I am fired up because the month of March on bavatuesdays will be a kind of homecoming for some WordPress blogging that I’ve not done in earnest for near on 7 or 8 years. In many ways WordPress has become invisible for me; it is the air I breath. That said, I do recognize I’m becoming a bit rusty when it come to seemingly endless possibilities of hacking it to do your will, but that’s why I still read bionicteaching and the cogdog religiously. So, the Reclaim Hosting team will be blogging about WordPress throughout the month of March, and if you are so inclined blog along with us and share it at the #reclaimWP tag on Twitter and/or drop your feed in the comments below and use that tag so I can pull them into our main site aggregator.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Learning, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Fall Reclaim Roadshow at Trinity College

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Reverend

Interest in the Reclaim Roadshow seems to be building as we just had to close the registration for the coming Roadshow at Bryn Mawr in May as we’ve run out of seats. This is the first time we’ve sold out in the two years we’ve been doing these regional workshops—which is pretty cool. 
But do not despair because Jason Jones and the fine folks at Trinity College’s Edtech group have been kind enough to host a Roadshow on October 15th and 16th. We have already opened up registration, so if you are looking for a Domains workshop this coming fall we’ve got you covered. 

For anyone new to the Reclaim Roadshow extravaganza, we run a two-day workshop that is usually hosted by a Domains school to keep the costs down. The first day is primarily geared towards system administrators of campus-based Domain of One’s Own project. Throughout the day we do a deep-dive into managing a cPanel server (a.k.a WHM), WHMCS (the automation and client management piece of WHM), as well as the WordPress portal wherein we integrate all three—a kind of technical holy Trinity of Domains if you will 🙂 Day 1 does come at a cost of $450 per person, and is capped at 15-20 attendees. 

Day 2, on the other hand, is free for anyone to attend, and this half of the workshop has evolved organically into a kind of user-group for Domain of One’s Own schools wherein they are able to highlight how they’re managing domains, to both provide guidance and get feedback from other folks using Domain of One’s Own. What’s more, day 2 is not so focused on the infrastructure of Domains, given there is a tremendous amount of sharing around specific projects and processes for working with staff, students, and faculty. It’s proven to be a generative experience for exploring how many different ways this project can be utilized in and out of the classroom.

You can get a rough idea of how we have designed the workshop by peeking at the schedule for Bryn Mawr’s Roadshow here. If you’re not already signed-up for May, then it may be high-time to get on bus this coming October!

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FIAB: Fix it Again, Bava

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Reverend

A couple of months ago I wrote a throw away post about fixing the loud fan issue with our PS4. It worked, the living room was once again inhabitable during game play, and I was feeling inordinately accomplished. Turns out one of Miles’s friends happened to be there when I fixed it, and I guess word got out I can fix Ps4s. Another friend of Miles has a PS4 that has not worked for months, and Miles came home with it in hand one day in mid January hoping I could look at it. Well, I’m definitely no Tim Owens, but I could not resist the opportunity to shine as a parent—something that rarely happens for me. So, given I am a one-trick pony, I tried the same thing I did on my PS4, namely getting some canned air and blowing out the fan, regardless of the fact the issue was entirely different than a loud fan (I did mention I was no  Tim Owens and a 0ne-trick pony, right?). Even worse, while opening up this PS4, which was the Slim model versus the bulkier one I had, I voided the warranty when I did not have to. So, not only did I fail to fix the issue, but I ensured that an actual professional would not touch it 🙂 

So at this point I actually had to fix it, but soon after I made this mess I was on the road to the US for several weeks. Father of the year! The PS4 would turn on and initially load the PS4 icon, after that it would crash before getting to the dashboard. From what I could interpolate between the PS4 support forums and YouTube videos this is an issue with a bad hard drive. Luckily for my guarantee-voiding ass Sony makes the hard drives dead simple to swap-out with any basic 2.5″ laptop hard drive. I had nothing on hand, but I ordered a $40 Toshiba 2.5″ hard drive with 1TB of space and it finally arrived yesterday. I tried the swap last night and it worked perfectly. The PS4 finally booted up as expected, and the only casualty was the player data on the corrupted drive. It was cool that it worked, and maybe for a few days my dad stock will be higher than usual 🙂 

Oh yeah, also of note to no one is that I replaced the charging port and battery on one of the PS4 controllers last month. It was another fun little PS4 project that I took on after learning a controller would cost me upward of $60 to replace. So, I tried a $10 fix of swapping out the charging port first which was shot, but the battery still did not re-charge, so the next step was replacing the battery in the controller for $15 and that did the trick. It still cost me $25, but I saved a controller from the logic of disposable tech I have internalized and also learned how to take a controller apart and fix some basics as part of the deal—so it’s a win all around.

Posted in video games | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Thank God for Mental Illness

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Reverend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOAdD_b1DWg

While I could talk at length about long travel stints away from home and mental illness, I’ll spare you those details. Rather, the misleading title of this post refers to Reclaim Hosting‘s latest shared hosting server named after the 1990s musical collective The Brian Jonestown Massacre.* Ever since watching the 2004 documentary Dig! last year I have been binging on their music, particularly the My Bloody Valentine-inspired shoe gaze during the early 90s (the album Methodrone is amazing) into their psychedelic 60s exploration in the mid-90s. In fact, in 1996 they self-produced 3 albums in that year alone, all of which I have been listening to non-stop for over a month. And beyond that there is still a ton of music I have yet to hear given they’re still recording new music with 18 albums to their credit and counting. One thing that has struck me listening to their music so far is not just how prolific they are, but also how amazing their musical range is—traversing and experimenting with instruments and genres like few other bands I’ve heard.

Brian Jonestown Massacre (often abbreviated to BJM) is my new obsession, and if naming a Reclaim server after them can get just one other person to explore them than my job is done here. Below are a few excerpts from their Wikipedia article focusing on the 3 albums they recorded in 1996, the third of which (Thank God for Mental Illness) was reportedly recorded for $17.36.† 

Over the next couple of years the band shifted its sound from their more shoegaze, goth, and dream pop influences of the 80’s and 90’s into a 60’s retro-futurist aesthetic. As lineup changes persisted, the band continued to record and in 1996 released three full-length studio albums. The first of these, Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request reflects a pastiche of 1960s psychedelia. The album also includes vast experimentation with a variety of different instrumentation including Indian drones, sitars, Mellotrons, farfisas, didgeridoos, tablas, congas, and glockenspiels.[10] The title of the album is a play on words of the Rolling Stones’ 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request.[11]

The band’s second album released in 1996, Take It from the Man!, is rooted heavily in the maximum rhythm and blues aesthetic of the 1960s British Invasion.[12] The album includes the song “Straight Up and Down”, which was later used as theme music for the HBO television drama series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), and was engineered by Larry Thrasher of the influential group Psychic TV.

The third and final album released that year was Thank God for Mental Illness, a more stripped-down effort. Since the band did not have a drummer at the time, Newcombe took the opportunity to showcase more of his acoustic songwriting. The album explores more in-depth genres such as country and folk.[13] At the end of the album Newcombe included an entire EP called “Sound of Confusion”, compiled largely from earlier BJM recordings. “Sound of Confusion” features both regular songs and more abstract sound collages.

The cool thing is that this collective (it’s more than a band 🙂 ) has been going strong for almost 30 years, and while the documentary Dig! focuses on the erratic, drug-addled misadventures of the band (in particular the leading man Anton Newcombe, which admittedly makes for fun viewing), there is something to be said for sticking around long enough and continuing to do the work—or make the music, as it were. So, our latest server, bjm.reclaimhosting.com, is dedicated to all those folks in education who have stuck around and continue to try and make the music despite all the noise, noise, noise. 

*I know there are some who have taken issue with our server names suggesting that when taken out of context they could be considered offensive. All I can say to that is taken out of context most things can be. What’s more, we refuse to give up self-expression through the various cultural touchstones that ground the work we do in exchange for some soulless pursuit of a homogenized business identity.

†See, not all independent music acts are caught up in the music industry game as some (who have left our game) have argued when trying to poke holes in the Indie EdTech analogy floated several years back.

Posted in reclaim | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments