Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome genderindex.org, which is actually two related sites running on two related platforms. genderindex.org runs on Drupal, while my.genderindex.org runs on Django.
The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is a new composite measure of gender discrimination based on social institutions. It measures gender inequality in five areas: Family Code, Physical Integrity, Son Preference, Civil Liberties and Ownership Rights in 102 non-OECD countries.
A ton of excellent new sites maintained by journalists and artists have been added to the Birdhouse Hosting roster over the past couple of months, including:
angelajbass.com
Angela highlights issues related to women, girls and people of color in the Bay Area and abroad, and groups that have been historically misrepresented by the media.
annavictoriabloom.com
Bloom began working in journalism as a newspaper reporter in Park City, Utah, covering everything from the Sundance Film Festival to skiing to town hall politics.
exactcenter.net
As a science teacher, I have the special privelage of getting to know my students and enjoy every one of them for what they teach me as well as what I might teach them. The values of their parents and the raw culture of our society greet me each day as plain as the eye can see when I walk into every class.
good4uproductions.com/raisetheroof
Raise The Roof is a free iPhone app with one simple goal in mind: to get you to dance with your iPhone and have a little fun. The app gives meaning to that infamous dance move “raise the roof.”
greentuliphandmade.com
Green Tulip designs for textiles, T-shirts and the Web are truly handcrafted one by one. The look of each design is original because each design is made from scratch. Green Tulip designs are made from materials that feel good in the hands: paper, scissors, glue. Each design is defiantly non-digital to ensure a handcrafted feel even online.
kimbennett.net
Kim Bennett is an artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay area.
mundusjournalism.com
An international consortium of universities and media outlets work closely together to run the Mundus Journalism programme.
noahbuhayar.com
I am currently a candidate for a master’s in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Before graduate school, my background was mostly in print journalism. Now, I am focusing more on producing multimedia features for the Web, particularly on business topics.
sethrf.com
“My undergraduate thesis, which began with a summer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was on connections between the Unique Games Conjecture and semidefinite programming-based approximation algorithms.”
All sites also listed at the ever-growing list of Birdhouse Hosting Sites.
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome Article Journal:
Article is an online journal based in the San Francisco Bay area that strives to provide a venue for heartfelt and engaging conversations about art. We believe in talking openly and assuredly about inspiration, imagination, magic, politics, ideologies, atrocities, spirituality and love. These are the elements that define what we make and how we see.
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome several new web sites that have gone live over the past few weeks:
This blog seeks to advance the use of network-based communications and media to develop new services and products that enable people to enrich their lives and transform our society through web and mobile technologies.
The VISION FORUM, a ministry of the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, was founded in 2008 to increase awareness of the reality of the human condition and the promise of hope and healing offered through education and the arts leading toward a sustainable, just, and peaceful world.
Finally, a lovely church site for a wonderful local community:
The mission of the Hillside Community Church is to provide a place of worship for the community and to facilitate spiritual growth.
Birdhouse Hosting is happy to welcome Significant Objects, the latest brainchild from Hermenaut Josh Glenn. The project is so interesting I’m going to run the whole back-story:
Rob Walker and I are amateur students of the “cathexis” via which significance accrues to inanimate objects, particularly ones that aren’t as obviously meaningful as, say, heirlooms, travel souvenirs, or objets d’art. Rob’s “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine attempts to figure out why consumers respond the way they to do particular products, from consumer items to TV shows; while a book that I coedited, “Taking Things Seriously,” asked 75 writers, artists, and other creative types to describe the surprising significance of unlikely-looking objects found in their homes, offices, and studios.
Agreeing that narrative — stories — is the vehicle through which insignificant objects become significant, Rob and I decided we’d run a test. We’d ask authors to tell stories about worthless objects that Rob and I had purchased at thrift stores and yard sales for a couple of bucks at most. Would said objects then become significant? If so, how to measure such a transformation? Rob’s brilliant/funny solution: Put the objects on eBay, using the authors’ stories as the Item Description (while making it clear that the story was fictional), then see if the objects sell for more than we paid for ‘em. We’d pass along all proceeds from the eBay sales to the authors; and we’d send the item and also the story to the winning bidders.
So this spring we contacted 35 authors, some of whom we knew and admired, and others whom we just admired. The response has been very gratifying, indeed. Posted today: Great object-oriented stories by Lydia Millet, Matthew Battles, Annie Nocenti, Lucinda Rosenfeld, and Luc Sante. Coming soon: More objects, and stories by Stewart O’Nan, Matthew Sharpe, Cintra Wilson, Ben Greenman, Michelle Tea, Kurt Andersen, Rebecca Wolff, Mark Frauenfelder, and Bruce Sterling, among other talents. Eventually we hope to publish 75, or maybe 100, stories about these ex-insignificant objects.
I won’t keep sending emails, but we will post one or more new objects/stories to the website every weekday. So stay tuned! Please read the stories, leave comments, bid on objects (cheap!), and most importantly, please help me SPREAD THE WORD.
Birdhouse Hosting is proud to welcome a chilling, but expertly produced new web site by photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, priceofsex.org:
Chakarova has spent more than six years reporting on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East. The site features a series of interviews with young women sold into prostitution against their will, multimedia video pieces, reporting notes, previous work that launched on PBS’ Frontline/World, NGO resources and ways to get involved. Chakarova says:
Please spread the word and leave comments on the site. Your input is invaluable. And as always, I am grateful for your support and interest in my work.
It’s been ages since I’ve promoted Birdhouse Hosting customer sites here on the blog — but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped taking on new users! Here’s a quick list of some of the best new sites to join Birdhouse in the past six months (full list here).
backyardmedia.org
As a writer and multimedia journalist, Wroth brings subjects to life with fresh and media-appropriate use of photography, audio, video and the written word. She earned a Masters from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2008. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she focuses on food and agriculture, health, and urban renewal.
Hilobrow
“Middlebrow is not the solution.” A Josh Glenn project site.
ktgkids.com
Kid-friendly version of the classic Archive of Misheard Lyrics.
jaimegross.com
Jaime Gross is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco, California. She writes about culture, design, art, architecture and travel—and the places where they overlap—for the New York Times; T, the New York Times Style Magazine; Travel + Leisure; Dwell; and Town and Country, among others.
swisswatching.com
Jackie and Seth are spending a couple years in Switzerland, living just outside of Lausanne in Renens VD.
haomama.us
“Raising Children in Mandarin and English. This site is part of my never-ending quest to find and share resources that make learning Chinese a fun and organic part of our children’s lives.”
Poor Babies
Life is Tough for the Rich and Powerful. Another Dan Gillmor project.
mediactive.com
From journalist/technologist Dan Gillmor comes Mediactive: A Users’ Guide to Media in a Networked Age. “My goal is to help people become active and informed users of media, as consumers and as creators. We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage.”
tomabate.com
Tom Abate is a former small-press publisher turned newspaper reporter who lives in Castro Valley.
Did some math and took some notes on real-world disk usage patterns by Birdhouse Hosting customers. Short version: The vast majority of users will never utilize even a tiny fraction of the massive amounts of space being offered by some of the largest/most-oversell-crazy web hosts out there.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes karaandrade.com
Kara Andrade is a veteran of multimedia journalism, both for print and online. She builds communities both online and off-line and has reported and organized events in virtual worlds such as Second Life.
Great-looking site!
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes albanytoday.org, an experiment in low-cost community journalism by J-School student Linjun Fan:
Linjun Fan covers Albany related news stories and writes a series of feature stories about Albany’s diverse residents.
This is the first site we’ve migrated from a free wordpress.com blog (Fan wanted to start running ads, and to have the ability to tweak her own themes, both of which are disallowed by wordpress.com). Impressed by the quality of the export/import system (which included all media), and by wordpress.com’s domain redirection service.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes moabfolkfestival.com, promoting, what else? The Moab (UT) Folk Festival, being held November 6–9, 2008 in, where else? Moab, Utah.
Plans for a proper CMS for the site are in the works.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes the What If? Foundation, a wonderful charity feeding more than 6,000 malnourished and impoverished children in Haiti weekly. I’ve been working in the margins over the past few months to port their site out of a horrible and inflexible .ASP back-end and into WordPress, as well as consulting on the design and implementation.
Our Mission is to feed and educate impoverished children in Haiti, providing hope and opportunity for a brighter future. Founded in 2000, the What If? Foundation funds food and education programs for children in Haiti. We’re making a tangible difference in the lives of some of the world’s hungriest children. We welcome you to join us.
It’s been one of the more challenging collaborations of my freelance career, but everyone is happy with the results, and I’m proud to have donated some time to the effort. The work the foundation is doing is marvelous. This is the kind of site Birdhouse loves to work with – forward-thinking and effective.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brianpollack.com:
Brian Pollack is a west coast filmmaker. His work has taken him from Sitka, Alaska to al Anbar, Iraq. He has directed, associate produced and worked as cameraman on productions for National Geographic, Triage Entertainment, and CBS 5 Investigates in San Francisco. His print work has appeared in the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, and North Gate News Online.
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome kaplanforoakland.org, a site promoting candidate Rebecca Kaplan for Oakland City Council.
Rebecca’s diverse experience as a civil rights attorney, an outreach consultant protecting Oakland residents from predatory loans and foreclosures, and as an elected Director for the AC Transit Board, makes her the right choice for Oakland City Council. She has the policy-making skills necessary to bring positive change.
Yet another WordPress site (not designed by me – I just ported her static Dreamweaver templates to work within WordPress so the candidate could manage her own content more easily).
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome the Canyon County Zephyr, out of Moab, Utah – All the News That Causes Fits.
“… the Canyon Country Zephyr, based in Moab, Utah. Editor and publisher Jim Stiles has loaded this irreverent newspaper with enough good reporting to put metro papers to shame… the Zephyr tells it like it is. In Moab, the erstwhile outdoor recreational capitol of the interior West, the siren like allure of booming tourism has become, for many, a monster out of control.”
A redesign of the site is in the works.
Several years ago, when Birdhouse Hosting was young, I was researching the market to find a reliable datacenter that was entirely powered by renewable energy sources. I did find a few, but none working at the scale I was looking for (some didn’t have 24×7 monitoring and support; others did, but didn’t provide cPanel licenses). I ended up going with ServInt, and have been extremely happy with their reliability and support.
Today got some exciting news: ServInt has just announced that their whole VPS operation has gone not just carbon-neutral, but climate positive:
ServInt’s commitment to climate-positive hosting applies to its entire line of Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting services. Each of ServInt’s VPS services is backed by a commitment to offset the total carbon-footprint of the VPS by at least 110 percent. ServInt accomplishes its carbon-offsetting goals through large-scale reforestation campaigns operated by American Forests (www.americanforests.org).To ensure a truly climate-positive approach, ServInt calculates its reforestation commitment not only on the energy consumption of the host servers, but on its entire VPS infrastructure. That includes compensating for all core routing and switching equipment, for cooling and redundant power operations, and for an extensive back-LAN that provides customers with free backups and centralized update repositories.
Birdhouse Hosting is proud to announce support for Ruby on Rails! All users will now find a new Ruby on Rails icon in their cPanel interface, and we’ve written a new Rails FAQ explaining how to get a RoR application scaffold off the ground.
We can’t support actual Ruby programming questions – users will have to turn to the Ruby on Rails community for that – but we will help you get an initial RoR installation going. We’re looking forward to seeing what you create.
To celebrate our recent upgrades to CentOS, Apache 2, and PHP 5, the launch of a new specialized student hosting plan, and reduced hosting rates and increased bandwidth offerings for all users, Birdhouse Hosting is proud to launch a brand new Birdhouse Hosting web site.
The entire site is built on WordPress, and features a newly integrated News section. The fancy navigation menu animation unfortunately doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, but degrades well and is still functional for brain-dead browsers.
Our new Plan A account, optimized for student budgets and hosting needs, is available to students everywhere (with proof of enrollment, if we don’t already know you), and is valid until one year after graduation.
We’ve also reduced rates a bit for our other hosting plans, increased bandwidth and storage allocations across the board, and increased the number of plan features available to all users.
Feedback welcome.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes marilynberlinsnell.com, a portfolio site for journalist and editor Marilyn Berlin Snell.
I’m a San Francisco-based journalist and editor. Partial to Vladimir Nabokov, who said that “curiosity is insubordination in its purest form,” I’ve utilized my predilection for nosiness, most recently, on political and investigative stories related to the environment, profiles of unlikely environmentalists, and special projects tied to climate change and green living.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes arabist.net:
The Arabist is dedicated to covering the politics and culture of the Arab world. It is published and maintained in Cairo, with contributions from journalists and researchers working in the region.
On the same hosting account are two additional popular blogs covering Arab culture and politics: Hatsheput, on women, society and academia; and 3arabawy, by Cairo-based journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy.
The Arabist came to Birdhouse looking for both WordPress expertise and bandwidth optimization assistance – we’ve been hard at work providing both.
Update: Five days after moving the sites over, many Egyptian ISPs are still pointing at the old host, which means the old “72 hours for global DNS updates” rule of thumb just ain’t true. The journalists are now trying to cover recent Egyptian riots, and many Egyptians aren’t able to see the updates. I’m getting hammered with requests to “do something,” but all I can do is to try and contact the Egyptian ISPs and ask them to please flush their DNS caches. No luck yet. Ah, the joys of running a hosting biz.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Harvard Right to Serve, a site promoting a student-developed program at Harvard University to put an end to the U.S. military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is perhaps the most discriminatory law in our country today. Since President Clinton signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law in 1993 over 12,000 GLBT men and woman have been kicked out of the Armed forces because of their sexual orientation. The Harvard Right To Serve campaign is a student-led effort that seeks to end this injustice. From May 24-31, 30 students from Harvard University will embark a four city journey across America that will highlight the injustice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In each city one openly GLBT Harvard student will attempt to sign up for military service. When their desire to serve is rejected participants on the Harvard Right to Serve tour will sit-in at the recruitment station to highlight the injustice of denying a citizen the right to serve based solely on their sexual orientation.
PHP 4 is approaching EOL, and Birdhouse Hosting, like many hosts, has been in “pause” mode on the prospect of a PHP 5 upgrade for a while, cautious of the possibility of breaking customer scripts. We’ve also been running on Apache 1.3.x since forever. But after much research, finally decided it was safe to just go for it. Spent the afternoon and early evening compiling Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5, all required modules, tweaking handlers, and taking care of a few post-upgrade burps. Everything seems to be running smoothly, with not a single customer complaint (let us know if you find anything not working!)
Stay tuned for a revamped hosting site and a new pricing structure in the coming months.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes westberkeleyfoundation.com
The West Berkeley Foundation has given over $1.3 million in grants since 1993 to non-profit organizations that serve Berkeley’s most underserved children, elders and families. It is only possible because of the caring action of individuals and companies that believe philanthropy begins in our own backyard.
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Scalability Boot Camp” with:
Blaine Cook Architect, Twitter Inc
Jakob Heuser Architect, Gaia Interactive
Alan Kasindorf MySQL DBA, SixApart
Sandy Jen Co-founder, Meebo
Kerry Miller Writer, passiveaggressivenotes.com
Good tips from diverse perspectives. Everyone on the panel admitted to having made huge scaling mistakes in the past, and to having learned critical lessons from real-world usage patterns.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes cornycrow.com, home of Corny the Crow and his ventriloquist friend Steve Cheney:
For 20 years Steve and his partner, “Corny Crow,” have presented their unique show for children and adults throughout Canada, from the east to west coast in the U.S. for fairs, festivals, schools and libraries. Either performing his hilarious show on stage or presenting his humor with a message to schools, Steve’s warmth and humor comes through in all his performances.
