 Hey everybody, welcome to our last session. It's called What's Next for Domain of One Zone? I'm joined by Pilot and Tom. You want to say hi? Tom, you haven't been in any sessions, so maybe you should introduce yourself really quickly. I'm Tom Woodward. I have been messing with WordPress, Domain of One Zone, and Reclaim for many, many years. I currently work at Middlebury, and I am the Director of Learning Spaces and Technologies there. Awesome. Thanks. We're excited to have you. Really the point of this session is to talk about a few different projects we've got going on, mostly ones that Tom, you've done most of the work on, and we're trying to think of how we can deliver that value to folks using Domain of One Zone. These are things that currently we're working on, so it's sort of a preview of what's next, but some of it will also be looking for folks that are interested in trying some of these things to get feedback and just let us know how it works for them. Yeah, where do you want to start, Tom? Let's start with the Domain of One Zone data plugin. I think I've got my screen shared, but I don't know if there we got it beautiful. But I blurred out our special information, so this is like our actual live Middlebury Domain of One Zone stuff. You would be able to see usernames and emails here, which is nice and good and useful, but I blurred them because we're showing this to the world, just being super protective. So in any case, what this is doing is it's giving you, there's a CSV that's generated, it's usually thrown automatically to a root directory on your server, and it's a little bit of a hassle to get to, and then you have to pull it down, then you have to open it in something and then you could search it and do some things. So we thought it would be fun to put it in WordPress with your root account and then be able to, I don't know, make it a little more powerful. So what's going on here is it's every night, I think, the data's refreshed, and then we've got a couple of different ways we can interact with it. So one, we can just click on it and see the data last log in, we can sort by username back and forth. We could highlight that we have some really high disk usage in WordPress, ouch. We can look at start dates, we can do a combination of those things, but we can also do stuff like search for the word Japan, and then I've got all that stuff pulled up really quickly. This is really great for me because a lot of times I won't remember what field the search is in, and if you try and WHM, I think it will search some of the fields, but not all of them. In this case, this searches across all the fields that we have in the data set, which can be handy. So you'd also pull in anyone who had Japan in their email or something like that? Right, exactly. And that can be really nice when somebody signs up with a username that's weird, and they name the URL something that I don't remember, and the only connection I have to them is their email. So that can be really nice. And you can see too some other things, there's pagination, you can page through, but you can also copy whatever you have in your found set and paste it into something or export it as Excel or CSV data. So if you came up with something you want to hear, that for some reason you wanted to pop out for something, you can do that pretty easily on the fly. But it's just, it's step one in trying to make that data more accessible and more powerful for you. And I think what's cool is down the road, as we kind of talk back and forth between Domain of One's own people and what they need, we can think hard about what data shows up in here, what needs to be the capabilities. Because right now we're using something I use just as a default. It's called data tables. It's a nice little way to make HTML tables do extra tricks. And since we're using jQuery and WordPress anyway, it's a nice way to do that. So you could use something like this in other projects. But it's a go-to way to kind of expand and make more powerful, just tabulated, typically. That's really neat, I think. Probably it's at the top of my mind because I was explaining WHM yesterday. But this is really nice because it's sort of that core list counts thing. You have to go into WHM to see this pose like all of the data that you really want from that or that you need off the top of your head and makes it front and center in WordPress, which is really fun. Yeah, it's basically that list, the last log-in script, or sorry, the CSV, which is what this is looking at, is basically just the data you have accessible to you from list accounts in WHM plus the last log-in date. Yeah, it's a little pared down. It doesn't include IP address and stuff, but you don't need that. Yeah, it's all going to be the same IP if you're on that particular server. So yeah, I think it's super useful. I love how fast this is because of the way it works with data tables. I think it's basically loading in the entire report at once. I've tried this on some pretty large human zone. I haven't noticed any issues with performance. The thing is computers are fast, and even like 3,000, 4,000 rows in this doesn't seem to be much of a problem from what I can tell. If you're pulling 3,000 or 4,000, does that mean you're testing it across multiple? Because I believe it generates a CSV for each server. So schools with more than one server. Is this pulling from multiple? Not right now, but that's something I'm currently working on. That is a tricky thing. Has been mentioned, leave has mentioned with WHM access. All right, Georgetown has three servers. Do I have to do this in three places? And the answer is often yes. With this, I'm currently working on a way. My goal would be to merge reports into one thing, but it takes a little bit because I have to shuttle the files between servers, but that should be possible. And I think a game changer because otherwise you have to go to WHM CS, look things up there, then find the right server, then go to your list accounts for you or your CSV or whatever. So I think this is actually a great way to unify that a little bit. Yeah, and if you're like Tom said, if you specifically want the last log in CSV, which is a little different, which is what this is and which has that little bit of extra data that you can't get in WHM, getting to it right now is a bit of a hassle. There's a couple of steps involved. The fastest way is really to reach out to us. And we're going to bring you if you have multiple servers, we're going to bring you multiple CSVs. You're going to have to take if you do it yourself, you'll have to take those steps multiple times. Yeah, and it's obviously, you know, copy and paste to merge them. But like it's it's just nice to have this up to date all the time. I even could imagine a use case for specific things like like a real common thing I wanted to know as an admin was like, hey, I went into a class yesterday and signed up a bunch of students. You could search by the start date here, right? If you put in twenty twenty two dash whatever date, right? Or twenty twenty three, I guess that I think is searchable. If I yeah, looks like it is so nine pages of signups in twenty twenty three. Yeah, it's cool. So obviously, it'll also include last logins in that. So that's the that's the downside to what I just suggested there. But, you know, it also is a CSV, right? So if you want to do something more advanced with it, OK, well, download is an Excel or CSV file and filter away, right? So I think it's a powerful tool that is also a simple tool that I'm excited and we're going to start rolling out this year. But if anyone watching this in this workshop wants us to get it up and going on your server, just throw us an email support at reclaim hosting dot com or edtech at reclaim hosting dot com. And we'll we'll get it added right away. So I'm looking for feedback on it. Yeah, so it's been useful for me. So if nothing else like it made my life a lot easier. So it was cool to me. Worth it. So I don't know. I'm going to keep messing with it and thinking through like, you know, what other data might be really powerful to have in that, you know, kind of snapshot view. You definitely don't want to go to WHM and other things for specific stuff. But, you know, for day to day stuff, this has been really valuable. Yeah, I can tell you right off the bat, the next thing I want and I think would be possible is a simple view of a report that just tells us every application install Tron knows about and what account it belongs to. Right. That could be huge because, of course, this shows the primary domain but does not show every application now. That'll be a big report in a lot of cases. But and we do have something that can generate that report right now. There is a version of that that exists. I don't know if it's on every server by default, the way that last logins is. But at the very least, we can run it for you. We get that. To me, the beginning of an effort to sort of unify and improve that reporting. Yeah, easy access to that data. Yep. Cool. And feedback from people about what maybe should be there and would be useful as part of like improving stuff like this. So help us out. And since we are doing domain on one's own, I'll show you one more thing that that that we worked on, which is kind of the idea that more and more unit colleges, institutions, whatever you want to call yourself are having both a domain on one's own install and possibly a WordPress site. So like the W does a couple other people. So the idea was kind of trying to choose your path. This idea of giving people some basic information about what you would choose and why, you know, this is close to what Shannon did at UMW. It's a little bit like some Coventry stuff, maybe. So definitely inspired by that idea and trying to lead to some choices. The thing that's a little bit extra about this plug-in is I thought it would be useful to be able to show people the plugins and the themes on your WordPress multi-site without having to keep it up to date by hand. And so it's a little bit, it just lists it automatically. So in this case, they're in a whole lot there. There's a couple plugins, a couple themes, but it builds this automatically and it does a couple other things like if you had one of these that you didn't want to be public for some reason, you can hide them because everything in this has its own unique IDs. So you could just hide it with CSS, you know, that that's and these are just little plug-in, I mean, little short codes that are tied to the plug-in that you could put any place. And, you know, this whole look was just an attempt to have something to provide some context and for people to either delete entirely or modify and build on in interesting ways. But it's, you know, again, trying to answer some challenges that people have talked about and provide, you know, that next level of capability to make life easier because I always wanted to do this public viewing of the plugins and themes before you get in. But never got around to it on my own and knowing that you will not keep up a manual list of these things. You will mean it with all your heart, but it will never happen. So that's that was the attempt to do some of this stuff. Is OK. One thing I'm just realizing. So these this is pulling in the actual description provided by the like in WordPress. OK, Mark, not marketplace, but that. Well, yeah, like plugins have it in like the plug-in for the main. Oh, yeah, yeah. But yes, you can tell, like, for instance, reclaim chooser for stuff that's magical, right? So that's probably what you put in the text file. I think that's my default plugin text, which that's kind of a funny one because reclaim chooser is the plug-in that they're looking at right now. That's what this is. So we may actually want to whitelist that one to be not included. But I don't know. I guess folks could run that on their individual sites, too. But yeah, well, that's a good point. And I think points again to like the stuff's evolving. So like feedback and comments like that are helpful. Like that's an easy enough thing to do. But I didn't really think about it in part because my development environment has like four hundred plugins. So I never noticed it, you know. So it's it's one of those things where we can keep kind of refining these things and making them better. I felt hard about whether to use the descriptions from the plugins and themes or not. And I was like, all right, well, if we don't use them, then we need a whole another methodology for people to write their own. And are people likely to do that? You know, are people going to want to customize the descriptions of the plugins and themes? It feels like that's going to be another thing people will want to do and intend to do, but it will not be kept up because it's just too much hassle. Yeah, and you it would be hard way, way different type of problem to offer an ability to like, all right, I'm going to read in the plugin names and then give you a place to type in your custom descriptions. It would honestly be easier to go in and edit them in the file manager, probably. Not that I would honestly bother with that either. One thing maybe we could do if there's a need for this is we could wrap like the description in a class so that it could be hidden via CSS. If you're like, I just not I don't want to have a description that that would be possible. And even without that, I could I could probably write a CSS rule that's like, all right, hide the second child of this class. You know, there's ways to do that. So yeah, yeah, that that's how personally how I would handle it if you felt strongly, but I think the fact that it pulls out as descriptions in by default is great. That's going to save a lot of time. Yeah, I mean, this whole thing here is making things easier. Not at streamlining stuff you want, not having to do these manually. So yeah, for sure. Cool. All right, so I think maybe the next thing I wanted to talk about, and this isn't so much coming to Domain of One Zone as it is a tool that you can use with alongside Domain of One Zone or in concert with. But and it's come up a little bit already today is site archiving. So one of the things that I liked to do when I was Domain of One Zone admin was to archive like flattened sites to HTML for things that we wanted to preserve. But they were, you know, belong to someone who no longer was with the college, but they wanted it to stay around, of course. Or maybe it was something that the person was still there, but they just didn't need it in their account anymore. And it was just like, let's keep a copy of this read only, right? Like we don't need this Omega site anymore, but I would like to see what it looked like. And so I've been using a couple different tools for that over time. HT Track, which is a command line tool and I think it has a Windows UI as well. And and also stuff from the Web Recorder project, which is really cool. We had something similar, sort of in the name of like responsible storage management. We worked with users sometimes who were had very large sites that didn't really they wanted to keep, but, you know, they weren't actively updating anymore and flattening things to HTML was huge. But I think we didn't know. I didn't know about HT Track or the Web Recorder project at the time. We were using a very particular WordPress exclusive plug-in for HTML flattening that I think is now defunct because we were running that on WordPress five and it was not getting updated. And there's simply static is a good option. I think I'm pretty sure is still maintained or maybe that was the one. I don't know. I don't remember it was years ago. The thing with that is at least for my use case, it's frequently WordPress sites that I'm least worried about because I mean, the if you don't maintain them, they'll stop working eventually. But WordPress is pretty resilient and we use it enough at Reclaim that we can often get things working. It's often these things that are like, I don't know, they're running some CMS that like a computer science student wrote seven years ago. And, you know, like those things are so tricky. And you could have said flattening Scalar and I would have gone with it. Yeah, well, I wanted to give a particular. I didn't want to pick on anything, you know. So you're picking on the computer science student from seven years ago. Well, I'm not it's not their fault that no one's paid them to return to it. So or offered them a degree for returning to it. Right. So so it came up once in a while or you just something you don't want to maintain. So what I wanted to do was put together basically a tool that domain in one's own admins could use to kind of make two versions of a site archive using browser tricks crawler, which is from the Web Recorder project and makes a specific kind of web archive file. That's really, really kind of cool. We can show a little bit in the couple minutes we'll have. And also HT track, which does flattening, which I can also show a little bit. But basically what this thing does is it's it's available on reclaimed cloud. It's also available to use on your local computer. And I it's this is kind of like fresh out of the gate. Like I just kind of got it working a couple weeks ago and I'm right now working on documenting it. It's available at my GitHub page right now with the documentation that I literally wrote today. Let me know if there's typos. So this is still very new. But basically it's a script that you can run that will archive sites in multiple different formats automatically for you. And then it zips them up so they're really easy to upload and bring and upload to domain one zone or shared hosting and it will crawl an entire site, basically. So it's not just doing one page, but it will grab everything on the particular domain that you've specified. So the easiest way to use this thing is on reclaimed cloud. There is an actual marketplace installer. You can just go to the marketplace, type in start archiving toolkit and give it an environment name and hit install and it will start going. I already have one, of course, so I'm going to use that one. But mine lives at archiving.ca.reclaimed.cloud. You could map a custom domain if you wanted to. But the nice thing about this is everything it's doing here in this extremely ugly interface that it it's not ugly. It's classic. It's yeah. So it is portable. So once it's made an archive, these don't have to stay on reclaimed cloud. You could put them on domain one zone or shared hosting or wherever you want. Anything that really can serve up static files will work. So, for instance, here, here's a archive of my blog. So it makes it in two formats, HTTrack, which is a flattened HTML copy. So this is what it looks like for reference. My blog looks exactly like that, although I'm zoomed in on this one. It's because you didn't do it on the directory. Yeah, I forgot. Yeah, good point. OK, so I'm zooming back out, but you can see comparing here, it looks the same and every post is archived. Every link on the page gets clicked on. And if the link is in the domain I specified, which is jdn.me, it will archive it. So certain things won't, right? Like if I go to, like I linked to Lauren's website here, it didn't archive Lauren's site, right? It's just going to go load her actual blog at the real domain that was that. For instance, and if I go back here, there's also a version made with WebRecorder. So if I click on that, it'll load the WebRecorder archive. And same deal, I can click on all the links. Now, certain things aren't going to work. So in this case, it's it's trying to pull in a video. That's just because that's not on the domain I specified, right? So that's kind of the nature of these two tools is that they archive things a little bit differently. Like this WebRecorder thing has a toolbar that's supposed to look like a browser. Personally, I love that it has a reload button. Like, what is it reloading? It's never going to get any new information. I can click this all day. It's the same thing, whatever. But you get back in buttons and you can see the original URL. All that stuff's kind of cool, but there's different tradeoffs with both of them. So that's why I like having both available and why my toolkit makes both versions. So once you've previewed them like I just did, I can download the zip file and upload it, right? So I can just take this and upload it using the file manager and see panel and extract the zip and bam, I've got an archive. An example of that, I've done this with an old Grav site that I kind of no longer wanted to maintain, but I wanted a copy of. This is an old Grav site used to be at it. It actually still is at digises.jdm.me. So what I did is I made this archive, deleted the existing site and put this right where the old one was. If that makes sense. So the now it's still browsable and findable the way the old thing was. So and you can see I made this one a long time ago. Actually, this is before my toolkit was made, but I was using the same tools basically. So I know that was like a whirlwind. Basically, I just wanted to point out that this is a thing you can do. You can use it on Reclaim Cloud really easily. You can also use it on your own computer if you're a little bit comfortable at the command line. And you would just have to install Docker. There's some basic constructions here. I am looking to make these instructions easier. I'm still working on that. This is very new at this point. But, you know, if you have a use for this and you want help with it, you know, shout out in Discord. I'm sure we can, you know, get it working for you. Making the actual archives, especially in Reclaim Cloud, is super easy. You know, once you've made once you've used that marketplace installer, you do you'll just click this little terminal button. And then you just just type the word archive, a space and the URL you want. So how about a pilot? Can we can we let it loose on your site? Is that cool? Yeah, sure. All right. What's is it? It's just my name. OK. Dot com. Dot com. Yeah. So I do need to give a HTTP or HTTPS. It's going to complain if I don't. It'll it'll complain and refuse to do anything. So it's going to do its thing. And the output here is very ugly. But this is just what the program is doing. You can even close this. It's going to keep running in the background. So that's going to take a little bit because it actually does take a little while. But you can see there's a new list here. It says incomplete and it's got the domain name I gave it. And here are logs of it doing its thing. So again, this is not a very nice UI, but it should be a efficient and easy to use, even if it's a little bit unfriendly looking. And I made this because the tools that these two tools it's using, right, I didn't invent the tools. I'm just writing like a wrapper around them, basically, are a little bit tricky to use if you haven't used them before. So I'm trying to basically give you a good starting point with them. So, yeah. Hopefully that that's helpful. You know, if there's more questions about it, I'm happy to talk more about it. And but, you know, we're kind of running the end of our end of our time here with with Domain in one's own 201 in general. So, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just kind of looking in the discord. People are talking a lot about working with university archival departments and projects. Yeah. Yeah. And this is kind of a good point to point that out. I am not an archivist, like at all, right? So what that little script I made does is not going to give you all of the flexibility that something like archive it will do. It's designed to do one thing. Well, which is I want to archive an entire site and everything below it, basically, in the directory structure. There are other tools that let you make an archive of a single web page, right, or even like a couple. And we can talk about those in Discord if folks want to know more about those types of tools. This was designed to try and say, hey, I need everything on this site, but only this one site. And to meet that need, this is what I came up with. So, yeah, hopefully that's helpful, though. Yeah, I think we only have a couple of minutes, so I don't really have time to get into my full spiel, but one thing that I worked with and tried to do, in addition to university archiving, which was a question that I ran into, but less of one, just when I was a domain of one's own admin. I was only there for a year, so we didn't really have time to get into it. But talking with users about their project lifecycle was such a difficult conversation because no one wants to hear, hey, your project's not going to live forever. Link rot happens, software stops getting maintained. WordPress is really dependable, but maybe at some point you just don't want to update your site anymore. Or a critical plugin, you've built your thing around a particular plugin and it would be difficult to replace, right? That can happen, and someday WordPress probably won't be a thing. I don't know when that'll be, but someday, you know. 2304. You know, we say WordPress for life, but who's life? WordPress is life. Yeah, but users hate that conversation. But I think that's partially because you go up to them and you say, what do you want to do? And they go, I don't know what my options are, and that's scary. So it's a twofold problem of I don't want to think about what the end of my project looks like, and I don't even know how to do that. And so I really like this tool because at the very least, you can sit someone down and go, listen, it's a difficult thing to think about, but people have considered it and you're not adrift in the ocean. And it's a really nice place for us to end our two-day workshop is with mortality, right? Oh, yeah. So it's great. But, you know, on the other hand, like, I'm really excited about things like this, things like Tom's work with these sort of customized, like, let's meet these plug-in style solutions right where Domain of Ones Out Admins are and what they need. So that's particularly exciting to me. And so Tom, I'm really glad you could join us here at the end of the second day of our second and last day of our workshop. So thank you. And yeah, and thank you everyone in the Discord who's been participating in chatting. Thank everyone who's been watching. You know, this doesn't have to be the end of the conversation. This channel will stay open in Discord. These videos will stay on this website so you can always revisit them. And thank you all so much for a great workshop. So thank you. Thank you guys. This has been awesome.