Albany Today

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.

What If? Foundation

Whatif-Meals 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.

brianpollack.com

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.

Kaplan for Oakland

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).

Canyon County Zehphyr

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.

ServInt Goes Climate-Positive

Worldopener-Small 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.

Music: Elbow :: One Day Like This

Ruby on Rails at Birdhouse

Rails 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.

Music: The Bennie Maupin Quartet :: Ours Again

New Hosting Plans, Rates, Bandwidth

Hosting-Thumb 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.

Music: Jim White :: Still Waters

marilynberlinsnell.com

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.

Music: Electrelane :: To the East