 Happy Friday! How are you feeling January? Yeah it's super busy and yeah it's it's you know freezing cold as well. I hope wherever you are watching us from and joining us from you are safe and sound. There's been lots of storms going around everywhere in the last couple of weeks. Yes it is super cold in the US right now especially up in the north where I am in New York. Not as cold I think is where Taylor is in Wisconsin but I am enjoying my relatively warm house with a lovely view of the snow from inside. So it's my favorite way to see the snow is inside. So yeah so thanks for joining us. This is you know Marin has definitely joined I'm not sure have you done you've joined a stream before? Yeah I think we did a Halloween one you know and we did a hybrid working one as well like last a detail in the last year so I'm glad to be back. Yeah and so thrilled to have Marin here and it's just gonna be me and Marin today and we're just gonna keep things super casual just like a Friday info sharing just kind of catching people up on when when they can where they can find us and how they can find us so thought it would be a good way to start the semester because at Reclaim we are definitely feeling the start of the semester things are getting super busy it's been a week and I can only imagine how it has been for those of you who are getting your semesters started at your institutions so we are here to give you a little bit of a reminder of how you can find support from us and get you feeling strong on your start to the semester. Yeah definitely we are here to help and it's a matter of saying it's been a super busy week and one of the things you know as well as getting everybody's semesters up and running helping staff and students we celebrated a big launch this week and of our new offering Reclaim EDU your compass in the cloud and also excited to see that coming out you know it's an exciting new offering but it's also a suite of super cool new artwork so if you haven't checked it out yet we will show you in a minute where to find it and have a look at that but we were thinking about you know particularly as things get busy how it's easy to lose track of where you can find support how you can keep up to date and also do that skills development to kind of get ready for whatever the semester has in store so yeah Amanda and I are going to give you a guided tour over the next sort of 20 minutes to half an hour and you can just kick back relax have your coffee and yeah hopefully we can we can get stuff started so I'm gonna kick us off with you know the fundamental thing about all things in edtech blogging and I have those of you who are listening and watching our keen bloggers and if you are laps bloggers recovering bloggers lurchers where you are welcome we we hear you and we hear with you and we want to share a little bit about the Reclaim the blog with you which is where it's kind of like the one-stop shop really for all the announcements and blog posts from our staff and hopefully this gives you a really good overview of you know what's happening currently and as you can see here and this is where this big announcement is as well and look at some of the beautiful artwork and the Brian Malthus is made with the team here and and yeah read all about the newest offering and this is also a really good place to bookmark if you haven't already done that because the blog really is a fantastic place from which to find all the other information including the roundup the discord community and upcoming events and those are some things that Amanda and I will go through as well and Amanda I know you been blogging on the blog as well recently and what did you post about yeah so on Reclaim the blog you'll see just a couple entries down there just a quick wrap up for open publishing ecosystems that was that was me though my name is Reclaim hosting there just kind of that I think I posted that on the final day of the flex course just to let people know about our final session which was with Brian Allendike introducing and talking about hacks and just kind of wrapping that up and I think that is you know this blog base is relatively new for us I mean it's something I mean obviously we've always blogged but we're consistently trying to get things streamlined so that it's easier for folks to find what we're doing because like as Marin said we exist in a lot of different places at once and you can see that on the blog itself and so it's good it's just kind of cool that we're trying the way that we've been able to approach this new kind of Reclaim the blog space as like a quick little hey we're wrapping this thing up and it's just like a quick kind of post yeah right it gives you an overview and helps you find your way around and I think you know everybody's so busy you get so many emails many notifications so I like coming back to that because there's always something that I've missed and I really want to you know try and keep up to date and one of the things I also really love is that you know you you obviously you can get all the goodness of anything that you've missed in the roundup every month and I don't know how do you feel should we go and and talk briefly about the roundup I mean that is one of the you know the gifts in the roundup make me smile every every single month yeah it's one of my favorite things and you have to give a big shout out to Pilate who is the master of the roundup and they do a incredible job doing all the gifts and all the news and I really I really love that addition of the roundup that came out just at the end of the end of last year and again we talked a little bit about blogging in there as well but yeah I love this one yeah the roundup to me and I'm this is I'm honest to God not trying to be biased it is the best newsletter that I've ever seen I think it's it's fun it's dynamic but then I also it also has like a nice little like template that you can rely on a nice reliable outline that you know you can expect I'm gonna see something about the I'm gonna be able to go to the roundup to find stuff about people's blogs at reclaim I'm gonna be able to see what events have happened in links to recordings and all of that stuff so I think I think it's great I I agree and I also think it's a great example of the you know some of the technology that we help clients with like the ghost newsletter and it's one of the great example of that in practice like I have a newsletter myself and it doesn't run on ghost as yet because I missed the flex course on on how to use that last year but I am hoping we might be running another one because my own newsletter looks really sad in comparison to that and I'm looking forward to learning more about it so yeah fortunately we do have the videos on our YouTube channel okay well you see I'm learning something new here and I'm not sure actually we might not but I'll it might be is though a good idea even you know for us it's important to keep track of those resources but what I wanted to mention is that you know the newsletter only comes out once a month so you don't get too much clutter in your inbox and it's free to subscribe to and open to everyone so if you haven't yet subscribed please do and keep in touch with all the things on the reclaimed roundup and do you want to go on one of the things that the roundup makes me think about is what events are coming up and in in the next couple of weeks and our you know events calendar should we go and have a chat about that next yeah before we go to the events calendar I just wanted to also plug one more thing that is kind of like the minius baby newsletter that we have it is something that goes out also once a month and but instead of at the end of the month which the roundup comes out at the end of every month this comes out in the middle of the month and it's therefore dubbed the mid-month email so some of you might be familiar with that but it is something that we send out to particularly domain of one's own and manage hosting admins but anyone can subscribe and it's just a very condensed little newsletter that just says like this is what's happening you know this week yeah coming up so that you have a little a little bit of a reminder in the middle of the month if you want it and then that will link two things like as Marin is mentioning the events calendar which is kind of like the mecca of everything that we do or all the events happening at reclaim so yeah Marin if you can head over to the events calendar we can go through that and I'll get that link in discord as well I was just seeing while we were chatting Taylor and pilot of posts and comments around the newsletter and ghost and kind of what we have in store for that this year and that is one of the things that I really love you know is that while people are listening if you aren't discord community which we will also talk about a little bit and you are you're keen to kind of learn more there's folks there in the chat directly you can ask any questions that you might have or if you're stuck please let us know as well you know that's what this kind of episode is all about it's we're here to help get your semester off to a to a smooth start so yeah I'm glad that I asked the question around ghost because that's definitely something I want to learn more about yes we have lots coming up in on the events calendar so I'll head over to you yeah so when you go to events calendar it'll show you literally what is coming up chronologically which is really nice we've got here you know upcoming it so it tells you about our Friday stream so those are all on there now they didn't always used to be on there it'll tell you when the community chat is which is another event and way to get news I guess for reclaim and we do have a community chat remind your email that you can subscribe to as well and you can find that link from the events calendar for subscribing and then as you see here we've got a featured very big admin workshop for domain of one's on the site coming up in February this is the session we're going to have the workshop we were going to have last semester but we decided to move it to to February to kind of mid end of February just timing seemed to work better for a lot of folks so if anyone is interested you can find out all about it on our events calendar we'll have more information coming out about it as well through these communication hubs that we're talking to you about today so keep your eyes peeled for that cool I am I think that sounds really fun and I'm really also curious so above the admin workshop in February is the community chat and you mentioned already but for for those of us like you know I know the community is always growing new people are coming on board so if you've never been to a community chat Amanda what would you tell people to expect like you know what is kind of the vibe how do you take part and you know what why would you invite people along yeah that's a great question so the community chat is really a live chat it's a video chat that we have with community members who subscribe it's a call that people can come to we typically it's very loose format very casual gives you the opportunity to chat with us outside of discord and text kind of back and forth and typically though they do have some sort of topic that we focus on so that people don't feel like they have to come and sit it's not like an office hour type thing but people can come with questions and we have a lot of fun with these we typically get you know a decent amount of people who come and give awesome perspective on these topics that we bring and we just we just had a community chat on Wednesday which was talking about it's been a long week folks so forgive my thing wasn't that it was all about cloud hosting and more about reclaiming you and just checking in with people mainly about it and checking in with how how things work on others institutions and that's I think what's great about community chats is that we're able to share what other people in the reclaim community are going through and and what they what their circumstances are and really share that and bounce things off each other and usually they are recorded we didn't record this last one because it was kind of more of an informal chat and we had a little bit of lighter attendance because everybody is like crazy this week and so but usually you can find them on our YouTube channel or on YouTube okay cool I really am glad you mentioned that I really like the community know how sharing and I think you know that's one of the things I really like about the discord community and I don't know if I might come on to that in a minute talk a little bit more about this court but I really love the fact that you can you know just really learn from people's real experiences rather than sort of you know like an idealized kind of version of this is how it works in an ideal scenario you know I really love hearing sort of from people who say oh you know I have a member of staff who you know was an early adopter really excited and then maybe there's others who might need more support or more convincing you know with ad tech there's always something that goes brilliantly but also there's plenty of things which you know maybe more challenging so I always am in some ways nearly more interested in what didn't work and why then what did work brilliantly and easily and why so I really love these it's really awesome I am I think these are really great yeah and I'm glad you brought up this court because we can chat a little bit more about that as well but just the last thing I want to mention while we're kind of on this topic of how to get in touch with us and how to find out or how to not get in touch with us I'm getting ahead of myself how to see what we've got going on social media we do have a online account and we still post to X every now and then and so you can find us if you're in both of those places make sure you follow us because we send out posts a few times a week just to keep people in the know and you'll see last minute announcements or reminders not announcements so much for events that are going on so make sure you follow us absolutely and hello to those of you who are just joining us and saying hi and discord really great to hear from you I think someone just mentioned it's some coffee is kicking in if you can hear light snoring in the background of my stream that's my dog who's just fall asleep right next to me I'm taking her afternoon nap so I think she's definitely having a good Friday afternoon and so yeah the rhythmic dog snoring in the background to kind of start the start the morning and I have my cat Lurie cat in taking I would say she's taking her mid-mid morning nap but she stays there all day so she's just having her second sleep and thank you pilot for adding the links to our socials in discord and yes I know it's Twitter but I'm just a stickler for I want to you know it's not really anymore so make sure that's clear that it's different now the only group therapy if we keep on that topic for too long exactly so yeah awesome so how about we move on to the ways that you can get in touch with us and we'll just right into discord speaking of and so we've talked a little bit about yeah okay Taylor has a good point about redirects and URLs but if you're wondering what he's talking about go to discord so discord we've talked a little bit about it it is while we have the community chats that are kind of these live video calls where we talk about topics discord is more asynchronous although we do try and utilize it synchronously when we have things like streams people can be talking to us while we're streaming and we can kind of respond in live time or with a 20-second delay I think it is and so we invite you know anyone can join our server and talk with us we have lots of different channels try and keep things we try and keep things organized but it's also just use it however works best for you you can find announcements there we've got a space for you to just kind of talk freeform we have an ideas and projects channel resources and tools we have an RSS for blog posts for anybody who wants to add their blog posts RSS to it so it's not just from reclaim people it won't just see Jim groom's blog posts popping up in here although you will see a lot of them there are blog posts not just from us but from other members of the community and then we've have forum link and then you'll see all of our socials kind of pop up there as they're published as well and then also in discord not only can you find our live streams channel where people can chat with us on live streams like this live but also a channel for our flex courses so if you join our flex courses we'll do the same kind of thing where we'll premiere a video and when the video is premiering we'll be able to talk live time in that channel for anybody who is interested in joining us live but also they don't have to join us live if they don't want to you can always go back see what the conversation was in discord or and just watch the video after and Taylor has posting a couple helpful things in discord about discord and as well just talking about don't don't get too worried about what's the right channel and we have had people happen and be like I don't know where the right place to put this is and we appreciate that but you don't have to worry about it it is that's part of your experience don't be shy just pick some place to talk to us because all that matters is that you're talking to us these are just kind of it's really guidelines really and then you'll also find a community chats channel which is where you'll see us announcing that community chat is about to start and then we have an interest section where you can go and talk specific about specific subjects like accessibility see panel domain in one zone emerging interests which could be anything reclaim cloud and worst word press multi-site so I hope that was an okay overview wasn't that wasn't too rambling that was super helpful and I think you know one of the points for me that's really important about discord and why I think it's really such a fundamental part of the work that we do is that you know the open web isn't always a safe space to ask lots of questions and you know that there is I think it's a really helpful place to go if you are like you know an infugist you have some questions or you are you know someone who wants to explore an interest like I always love looking through the kind of resources channel just the things that people you know put up there like um or reflections on blog posts like what's happening with you know other platforms what's going on on the web in general what's happening at the start of term and I think it's really nice to hear kind of what people are doing and when you're like us working from home all the time like it gives you kind of like a waterfall environment as well you know like sometimes like I love working from home but sometimes it's really lonely and I don't really have anybody else to talk about things with so if I want to geek out about vinyl casting while I'm home working this was a good place to go and I really enjoyed that about the discord server that we have that as a space yeah I'm so glad that you can find it useful like that and we hope obviously that many people will and um just the main thing that is great about discord is that it is kind of a more casual or informal way to connect um with us and our community people who are also using reclaimed services um there are a lot of you out there and you're all kind of going through the same stuff and we have so many instances on discord of people um saying like has anyone come across this particular thing at their institution that you know is related to WordPress multi-site and how did you handle that and I mean everyone is super super helpful too like people love to pop in and kind of share their experiences and it's a way you can do it um just like as you have time um and if you want to just kind of like Marin said geek out with us about something we're always open to that as well um that's it's really easy to do in discord so it's it's an important way to keep in touch with us um but it's certainly not the only way if you have um you know kind of bigger more specific problems that you're dealing with or issues it's something that you're trying to troubleshoot related to our services then um the place you would want to go for that is um contacting support so um you can contact support at support.reclaimhosting.com submit a ticket Marin is sharing this screen um we have a knowledge base that is on that page as well uh so that you can kind of see what documentation we do have and we have a lot of documentation so um it's always it's always good to start there if you want just kind of like a quick DIY figure figure things out but you are always welcome to submit a ticket and you can do that at the upper right hand side of that page submit a request and um from there you'll be able to kind of explain what's going on and you'll get one of our support agents to take a look and uh we'll be able to help you specifically with those types of of issues yeah and um I think you know some before I started working with you guys I um I've had my my own little website an empire hosted and I think the the friendliness of the support has always been one of the things that stuck in my mind about you know working with retlaim the most it's because like always get back to you like a human being and explain things in terms that you can understand and I actually um I've used a lot of good documentation like as a customer and I always found it super helpful but how would you say um like someone who is new to you know could kind of differentiate between like an example of something they need a support request with versus something they might post on discord as a as a question so you mentioned earlier around you know experiences around shared hosting you know if you're looking to learn from other customers but what would be like a typical support request that that people might submit that's a great question so I mean there's all sorts of different types of support requests that people could submit um but specifically if you're thinking about should I put this in discord or should I put this in support I think an example of that would be something like um if you have something you need some feedback about like an idea or a project that you're you're thinking through that you could use input for that would be a great thing to put in discord because you can kind of bounce things off the community whereas if you're like I am having like a 404 error coming up on my website or um I'm having trouble getting SSL certs to assign uh that would be something to submit a support request about because you know we'll actually be able to get in there into your account and and talk to you about that and well you could always post in discord and share that you're having those issues with people if you wanted to we think it would probably be a little bit more uh a little bit more effective to have private conversation about that so that you're not airing your web dirty laundry to the rest of the discord and we'll just get that taken care of for you oh yeah I am definitely and you know I think it's nice to have that sentiment of sort of you know having a if you're looking for inspiration or if you're looking for you know just to chat with peers then you know the peer-to-peer support connection is in discord and I've been loving seeing people saying hi and jumping into our um our streams today as well if you do have any questions for us um do please post them in discord and we'll pick those up but Amanda I know we're we're nearly up against time um have we got any other things to point folk towards before we wrap up yeah I think the last couple things I would just point people to um would be our uh peer-to-peer space so if you're watching us live right now then you know you're either on youtube or you're on peer-to-peer and so that is um oh boy reclaimed.tv I'm always just copying and pasting it so um forgive me but yeah so reclaimed.tv for our um oops yeah okay there we go for uh you can see an archive of all of our videos or you can go to archive.reclaimed.tv if you want to go directly to all of the videos that are there as you can see on that page you're able to um chat with us directly in the discord channel Taylor has that hooked up real slick and um then also for specifically for flex courses you'll want to go to our reclaim ed.tech site where you'll find all of our blog posts you can find blog posts uh for our previous uh at tech flex courses there as well and um that's just where you would also follow along if you were following along with a flex course throughout a month so um and you can also see we have you know past events um we're gonna have to take that public open publishing ecosystems down off the menu and put that in past events because it is no longer december um and then you'll also find links to our event calendar and community chats there again we're just trying to cross link everywhere we can um and so making it easy for people to find us and find what's going on but um yeah i think i think that's that's all for now and um we hope that this was helpful for people to get kind of a refresher of where we have everything and i'd love we'd love to get feedback on you know what is helpful and um where people what people find the most handy when they're trying to figure out what's going on or how to get a hold of us and if there's anywhere that you feel like we could improve just let us know yeah definitely and if your interest has been piqued by what we said earlier around the big announcements at the launch of recline edu and you'd like to find out more about it then head over to the recline blog um where you can hear um look a lot more about it see some examples of institutions who are already trying it out and um get in touch with us if you want to learn more but yeah i hope this um this has been helpful i've definitely learned some new things i'm going to go and look up these ghost videos right now so i can get my um you set the revamp but um thank you so much Amanda for this guided tour it's been really informative yeah and thanks to everyone for joining us we will catch you next friday with a new stream so enjoy your weekend have a good weekend when it comes bye