Category: Hosting

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes coolwater.org: “Roger Moore’s oasis in the cultural divide.” Roger is an old friend and confidante, the only other person I’ve met who shares a not-so-secret love for the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, a dynamite chef, husband of one of my high-school friends, and one of the Bay Area’s foremost environmental defense lawyers. His weblog thus far comprises brilliantly written mini-essays and musings on the complexities and joys and poetry of Modern Life.

The exasperated chef regains composure as my little daughter, only recently able to walk, starts asking big daddy to bring her foods that her father, with his Midwestern upbringing, did not experience until at least age 25. “Baguette with goat cheese, daddy?” “hummus daddy?” “paella tonight, daddy?” I nod as she delivers a pointed set of requests that unmistakably identify her as a child of the East Bay, offspring of the edible garden. My wife walks in after not speaking to me for three hours, rolls the saffron-scented rice around in her mouth, touches me on the hand and tells me that maybe, just maybe, things will turn out okay. I love you, I didn’t mean it, neither did I, what’s for dessert?

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes vihara.us, home to the Oregon Buddhist Vihara, a community of Sri Lankan monks serving the Portland, OR area. Also home of the Venerable Pallebage Chandrasiri Thero, Chief Sangha Nayake for North America.

vihara.us is administered by birdhouse co-pilot Kurt von Finck, who serves on the Vihara’s board of directors.

Of course, my launch of the new birdhouse webmail system happened to conveniently coincide with the expiration of the demo security certificate that ships with CommuniGate, so users were getting confusing certificate notices from their browsers. Time to tackle certificates.

CGP provides an interface to generate a private key, which can the be submitted as a PEM-formatted token to an authority, or to OpenSSL. First tried generating a self-signed ticket from OpenSSL, but that of course still means that users get bothered by confusing “Warning: Self-signed certificate. Are you sure?” messages. In fact, IE on the Mac throws an alert that says “Communications will not be encrypted.” I’m not sure that’s actually true (if true, why doesn’t any other browser tell you that? A self-signed certificate should in no way affect whether communications are encrypted).

But I wanted these warnings to go away, so submitted my key to GeoTrust through a gateway provided by EV1 Servers. For some reason, certificates purchased that way are one-third the price of certificates purchased through GeoTrust directly.

A rather involved back-and-forth process of automated emails, answering questions on a web site, and recording my voice into their system through an automated telephone call-back system — actually very impressive identity authentication — and 15 minutes later received a certificate. Plopped it into the cert field in CommuniGate, and all browser warnings immediately disappeared on the webmail system.

Working over the past few weeks to revamp Birdhouse’s webmail system. Because the default interface for CommuniGate’s built-in webmail is beyond ugly, we’ve been running SquirrelMail over IMAP for webmail since launch. But Squirrel doesn’t offer access to all of CGP’s built-in goodies, such as mail searching, rule editing, calendar, tasks, notes, secure login, etc. The solution was in finding the great collection of 3rd-party Wassp skins by SolidInterface. Impressed enough that I bought a license (very affordable!) and went for it.

Launched the new system last night (with aliases redirecting from customer domains), and customer reaction has been very positive. Left Squirrel online at a separate subdomain for people who had grown used to it.

A birdhouse user wanted the ability to publish their iCal calendar to their own site rather than purchasing a .Mac account, so I’ve enabled WebDAV in apache. For now, I’m enabling user-home-level (or custom dir) WebDAV access on a per-request basis.

WebDAV alone does not give a server the ability to parse iCal .ics files into web-enabled calendars — users still need to subscribe to the .ics file and view it locally in iCal. To produce a full Web calendar from an .ics file requires post-processing by some kind of server-side software. Apple uses a proprietary WebObjects system, but open source equivalents are available — will look into those soon.

DAV functionality goes beyond iCal subscription access — users who want it can now mount their birdhouse home dir directly in the Finder or Explorer (or use any DAV client, such as Goliath). Working out a couple of small kinks before a full rollout.

Added a system status log for birdhouse hosting. All public info on status of / changes to the server environment will be posted there (customers will still receive email as well). Currently hosted here, but will move this to another machine before long so that it’s available in the event of an outage.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two new customer web sites this week:

circa1973.com: Photographs by Susannah Stromberg (Three | Surfaces | Something Beautiful | Offerings). Fine art photography, intensely rich. Color images, but with the poetry and dramatism most often associated with black & white.

osmosiscommunications.com: Vermont-based strategic public relations and marketing firm. “Osmosis promotes the “permeation” of information and ideas about your company–its goals, mission, promise and value.”

Birdhouse is happy to be hosting some great new sites:

journalist.org: “The Online News Association was founded in 1999 by several working members of the online press. ONA is open to journalists from around the world who produce news on the Internet and other digital platforms.” This nicely designed site is actually driven by four separate-but-related Movable Type weblogs, though you probably wouldn’t guess it by looking – they’ve dispensed with the MT templates altogether (why is this so rare?) The News section looks a bit more like a “traditional” blog. Also accessible via journalists.org and onlinenewsassociation.org.

landwater.com: A San Francisco-based environmental defense law firm. One of my good friends works here, humbly and skillfully championing some of California’s and Nevada’s most pressing environmental cases. Straight to The Supremes! We’ll be overhauling this site soon – watch for updates.

milesabovethemovie.com : “4 stories above the ground.” A film project by J-School student Michael Welt. I love seeing the kinds of sites our students come up with after emerging from our multimedia skills classes. Some of them go from zero to 60 very quickly.

… and one more I’ll save for another day…