Are you or someone you know skilled in website management and interested in using their skills to help heal and transform our world? Would you like to volunteer with Tikkun, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Beyt Tikkun to help ensure that our websites function smoothly? No matter who wins the elections, our voice is needed to steer public discourse toward fundamental change sufficient to address the deepening environmental crisis and deal with a Supreme Court packed by right-wingers likely to declare “unconstitutional” any progressive ideas passed by Congress even if supported by a new President. Ideally, we are looking for someone who would like to volunteer their time to help maintain and keep our websites running smoothly. For about the past 20 years, Craig Wiesner and Derrick Kikuchi worked for us but they are retiring at the end of October. They typically spent an average of 20 minutes a day working on the sites. If we cannot find a volunteer, we would hire someone to do this work.
Below is a list of the types of things they’ve been doing to keep our websites and email servers healthy over the years.
- Monitoring Domain Name Service (DNS) registrations and hosting plans and renewing when needed. We plan to make sure that someone in your organization becomes the “registrant” and owner of the domains and hosting plans so that you can manage this moving forward.
- Maintaining SSL certificates which need to be renewed each year. Again, we plan to make sure you have the ownership needed to do this moving forward. Your hosting provider can help obtain and install SSL certificates.
- Monitoring server utilization to ensure good performance. We do this 24/7 with tools that in real time tell us the number of visitors on the site, the number of processes being used, CPU utilization and RAM/Disk space usage. When we see spikes that represent a danger to performance, we take steps to throttle usage to avoid slowdowns and crashes. Spikes can be caused by Denial of Service attacks and we take steps when we see those to block the place from which those attacks are coming. In some cases we have to shut down the server temporarily and restart. We also monitor disk space usage to make sure you don’t exceed the amount of disk space allowed in your hosting plan. Inmotionhosting.com has a dashboard you can use to monitor all of this in real time.
- Setting up new accounts for email, setting up aliases / forwarders, troubleshooting email problems, and monitoring accounts to ensure they don’t exceed disk space storage. Someone on your team should be able to do this once we give you user ID/password information for the server management portal.
- Maintaining WordPress and Plugins – We don’t upgrade WordPress often, because your web sites use a variety of plugins and upgrading WordPress can cause your site to crash if the plugins are no longer compatible. We plan to upgrade WordPress to the latest version on all sites and document any plugin issues so that whoever is supporting your sites in the future will be aware of any problems.
- Offsite Backups – Although your hosting provider is supposed to do daily backups of your server we frequently do partial to full backups of your sites to another hosting provider. We recommend that whoever supports you moving forward have a similar process. We’ve paid for hosting on another provider simply for the disk space.
- Random stuff. Folks run into random problems they can’t overcome and call or email us for help. Because of our experience with servers, Linux, CPanel, web, email, WordPress, etc…… we are often able to figure out what the problem is and fix it.
If you or someone you know is interested in working with us, please email cat at cat@tikkun.org and include a resume and cover letter telling us why you are interested in working with us and what your previous experience is in website management. You can find our websites before applying at www.tikkun.org, www.spiritualprogressives.org, and www.beyttikkun.org.
Thank you very much for helping us find the right person to work with us.
Blessings to all during these very challenging times,
Rabbi Michael Lerner & Cat Zavis