Tim Owens - Throw Out The Manual (Page 5)

Tim Owens

🔎💾.ws

So apparently emoji domains are a thing, though a complicated one at that. I blame equal parts boredom and Bud Hunt (a very persuasive individual) for registering one last night. Here's the skinny on the how and why. First, how do you even do this? Well emoji can be rendered

Running a Jekyll Site on Reclaim Hosting

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Running a Jekyll Site on Reclaim Hosting

This weekend I decided to experiment with a feature we have enabled on some of our servers that is sort of an unsung hero for advanced users (so advanced I hadn't taken the time to understand how it works!). Jekyll is a static site generator that has grown in popularity

Reclaim Your Domain Web Series

A few weeks ago I decided to start putting together some targeted screencasts from the standpoint of building a website from scratch using Reclaim Hosting. It's one thing to have lots of written documentation (and we've got that in spades at http://docs.reclaimhosting.com/) but another to sit back

Site Publisher for cPanel

As a company, Reclaim Hosting is heavily invested in the cPanel software to drive a decent user experience for building on the web. It's been interesting to see them evolve the product after what honestly seemed like years of stagnation. The x3 theme which was still the default just a

Embracing a Quantified Self

I'm equal parts fascinated and horrified by the "Internet of Things" movement. As someone who can't resist playing with the shiny, I love the idea of connected devices. In practicality it leads to situations like this: Awesome, @AugustSmartLock locked my wife out of the house today with this UI decision.

Reflections on Indie Ed-Tech

Reflections on Indie Ed-Tech

Ever had one of those events where your mind was spinning afterwards and attempts to write about it failed due to just how much there was to talk about? That's the place I'm at now following up on the wonderful Indie Ed-Tech Data Summit at Davidson College this past weekend

Praise for Disqus

When I decided to ditch WordPress for my blog here and start playing with other blogging engines, one of the things I wanted to make sure of was that content could live on no matter what platform I was using. I don't subscribe to a complete archivist point of view

Back to Building

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Back to Building

A few years ago I switched this blog to using Ghost and decided it was a good opportunity to give my blog a name and image. I've never been big into fancy designs for what's essentially a space for me to think out loud, but there was some meaning behind

WordPress.com v/s WordPress.org

I've often seen folks run into issues understanding the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress the software. Plugins like JetPack that require WordPress.com logins make the waters even muddier unfortunately so the confusion is absolutely understandable. WordPress is a piece of software, similar to an app on your phone

Cleaning a Hacked WordPress Site

As I sit here painfully waiting on Godaddy's slow servers to download all of a customer's files so I can migrate them to Reclaim Hosting I figured I'd write up some thoughts on how I approach the problem of cleaning up a site that's been hacked. Not all WordPress hacks

Get Your Grav On

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Get Your Grav On

One of the many roles I have a Reclaim Hosting is keeping an eye on our Twitter account and interacting with folks there. I'm no power-user on Twitter but it's a space I know and I'm happy to support and respond to folks there. On Saturday a tweet came in

Where Did All My Disk Space Go?

Sometimes you may find that you just plain need more disk space. Perhaps you're regularly uploading large files to build an online archive for a project or you work with video files that need to be stored locally. As Reclaim Hosting has grown over the years we've consistently increased our

Using Google Apps with your Domain

Managing e-mail can be one of the harder parts of reclaiming your space on the web. While building a web presence is easier with modern applications like WordPress, the state of email clients and protocols is much less advanced. You'll have to grapple with getting your IMAP accounts setup and

Managing Databases with cPanel

cPanel includes several tools for managing databases in your account. The MySQL Database Wizard is a quick way to create databases, database users, and associate the two. The MySQL Databases area will show you all the databases and users you've created an help you manage the creation and deletion of

Folder Structures in cPanel

Top-Level Folder Structure We utilize an industry-standard control panel for hosting called cPanel at Reclaim Hosting, which has a lot of great tools for managing your account. However one area that can be confusing is the folder and file structure of an account and what all those folders actually do.

Importing Installations using Installatron

So I've been writing about some of the great features of Installatron that often go unnoticed like cloning and alternative backup options. Maybe those all sound like things you'd love to use, but you're old school and have an install in your account from long before you knew Installatron was

Alternative Backup Options in Installatron

After writing about the Clone Tool I started thinking about some of the other features of Installatron that aren't immediately noticeable but very powerful. One that I love is the variety of Backup Options in Installatron. Installatron has quite a few options for automating the process of backing up your

Easy Site Cloning with Installatron

All of us at Reclaim are getting into the holiday spirit with what Jim has affectionately referred to as Documentation December. I never know who reads the manual but it never hurts to be able to write out the process of doing some of the more complex things with your

Let's Encrypt and SSL By Default

Let's Encrypt and SSL By Default

Yesterday marked a turning point for the web. The Let's Encrypt project is now in a public open beta and issuing free SSL certificates to anyone and everyone. Until now running your site over SSL has been a difficult and laborious process that required quite a bit of technical knowledge

Monitoring and Improving

Monitoring and Improving

Our newest employee, Joe McMahon, recently wrote on the Reclaim blog about the excellent monitoring setup he's been working on using a product called Observium. Before now a lot of email notifications for various services had been coming directly to me and it got rather noisy, plus it wasn't sustainable

Inline Annotation and Commenting with WordPress

Inline Annotation and Commenting with WordPress

I happened to be working with the amazing Adeline Koh today in a support ticket and stumbled on some really interesting work she's doing for a client and asked her if she would mind me blogging it because it's a pretty clever solution to marking up documents in WordPress. Adeline

CageFS and LDAP

CageFS and LDAP

As Jim celebrates the beautiful history of WordPress and his own personal trajectory towards both the software and regular blogging at the bava, it inspired me that I need to use my blog a bit more as a personal mind dump. I had a bit of fun with him a

Testing with DevOps and Reclaim

Testing with DevOps and Reclaim

I was recently recommended a book from several different people including our most recent hire, Joe McMahon, called The Phoenix Project. In the book, the authors use a fictional narrative of a sinking auto parts company with an IT unit struggling to keep up with the modern demands of their

Bon Appétit

I grew up with a love for cooking. I enjoyed sitting in the kitchen watching my mother cook for our family and she would often show me various techniques, recipes, and let me help here and there with odd jobs. I'm sure it's not news to anyone that even those