The Open Source NewsCloud Community Starter Blog

Run NewsCloud at Rackspace for $45 per month

If you're looking for an affordable way to run NewsCloud, we've just released an installation script which works great with Rackspace's $45 monthly 1 GB cloud server. It also should work with any standard Ubuntu 10.04 server. 

Release 3.2 stable offers the Ubuntu installation script which we've tested at Rackspace. With this script, you should be able to get your NewsCloud community up and running within 30 - 45 minutes.

While this installation script is primarily aimed at open source developers, by the end of June we plan to offer an automated Chef-based installation which will drastically simplify this process for non-technical folks. 

You may want to review our installation support FAQs which offer a checklist of setup prerequisites. Three things you'll need to run your community are 1) A domain name or subdomain 2) Registration for a Facebook application and 3) a server for hosting, such as at Rackspace.

Please let us know if you try out the script. Post your feedback and questions at http://support.newscloud.com

This work is funded by our May 2011 Knight Foundation grant: NewsCloud to Make Facebook-connected Communities Easy and Affordable.

 

 

NewsCloud Release 3.1 Runs on Rails 2.3.11

Great news. NewsCloud's open source platform is now running on Rails 2.3.11. This should help developers interested in deploying sites and getting involved with our community.

Release 3.1 Stable is available for download at Github now.

Over the next month we'll be focusing on trying to fit NewsCloud into Amazon's AWS Cloud micro-instance, which offers free hosting to new accounts for one year. Learn more.

Up Next: Migrating NewsCloud to Ruby on Rails 2.3.11

On the path towards making NewsCloud easier to set up and use, we're migrating our code base up to Ruby on Rails 2.3.11. This will generally make it easier for developers wishing to try out the code. It's also going to give us a more current base to work from as we work on configuration for additional hosting solutions. We're planning to provide an alternate Release 3.0 (3.0a) when this is complete.

Knight Foundation to Continue Support for NewsCloud to Make Facebook-Connected Communities Easy

We are very grateful for the continued support of the Knight Foundation: NewsCloud to make Facebook-connected communities easy. We hope you'll learn more about our project, set up your own site or get involved as a developer!