For my last Digital Tools & Methodologies assignment, I was asked to gain a familiarity with the deployment of a webservice on my own server space, in order to appreciate the technological components that come together to make it function. The Process I undertook:
- To begin with, I searched for ‘Reclaim Hosting‘ on Google (the link can be found here: https://reclaimhosting.com/ ). For those of you that don’t know what Reclaim Hosting is, here is a little explanation: ‘Reclaim Hosting’ is a hosting industry which provides educators and institutions with simple ways of hosting and controlling their own domains and websites.
- I then followed all the required procedures in setting up my own domain space. The cost for a student hosting plan is $25 a year, which is roughly about €23.65.
- After establishing my domain, I used the ‘Getting Started Wizard‘ and the ‘Video Tutorials’ to help me get around and understand how to use the service better because I have never hosted my own domain space prior to this. I found both guides to be particularly helpful.
- As part of my assignment project, I had to download and configure a ‘one-click’ installation from a Reclaim cPanel and launch it on my web service.
- There is a broad range of web applications to choose from on the cPanel, I find this advantageous since I no longer have to search for each individual application and downloade them seperately online. I have it all in one location which saves me a lot of time.
Experimenting with different applications:
- In addition to this, I began experimenting with some of the blogging applications such as b2evolution, Anchor CMS and Dotclear by installing them on my cPanel, before deciding on which application I’d like to deploy.
- I was disappointed by the experimental outcomes of those blogging applications as they were not up to the standard that I was expecting them to be.
- The dashboard on B2evolution in my opinion, is unpleasing to the eye as it looked very technical which did not encourage me to use it.
- The overall aspect of Anchor CMS is much better than B2evolution as it has a clean and modern layout. If only Anchor CMS would have more features, for example the choice to customise the appearance of the blog.
- Dotclear however, is quite neat! It contains all the aspects of what blogging applications should have. There is a side-bar on the left hand side containing many widgets from Media Manager to Blog Appearance. I was quite annoyed when I tried several times to publish a sample blog post on Dotclear, I could not get the post to publish! In my opinion, that has to be the biggest downfall of the application.
What is the purpose of the service or application you have chosen? According to the results that I have obtained from experimenting with the above ‘blogging’ applications, I have decided to try out one of the ‘Content Management System’ (CMS) applications on my cPanel. The application on which I am reporting is called ‘ImpressPages’. 
Initially released in 2009, ImpressPages CMS is an open source content management application. It simplifies and speeds up the content management process, enabling websites to be managed up to 4 times faster. The latest version 4.0 was released in April 2014 marking the shift from CMS to a PHP framework. The technology behind ImpressPages CMS empowers people with no technical knowledge and with no upfront learning to manage their websites just as professionals do. There is a wide range of features such as: Inline Content Editing, Drag & Drop Interface, Widgets, MVC Engines, Multi-language support and translations, Automatic generation of SEO friendly URLs, meta tags, and sitemaps. Why are you interested in it and how might it be applicable to something you may do in the future? The main reason why I’ve chosen ImpressPages is because I would like to own a website for my professional career in the future. The idea of web designing sounds very interesting to me. ImpressPages has a clean layout. I like the Drag & Drop Interface which is simple to use. Steps involved in the deployment and configuration processes of my chosen application: Deploying ImpressPages was very quick and simple. All I had to do was click ‘install’ and input my administration details such as username, password and email address. There was no further configuration process being carried out by the administrator, as it was already done by Reclaim Hosting itself. Who would benefit from access to such service/application? Many businesses, organisations and educators would benefit from this application because it’s an open source and it’s free of charge to anyone who wants to create professional websites. ImpressPages empowers people with no technical knowledge and with no upfront learning to manage their websites as professionals which I find advantageous for people who are not tecnically skilled in Information technology.
Chanamon Chaiyakul 