We’re simplifying email setup!

Good News! We are making email a breeze to set up by introducing a tool that does all the hard work for you. We know that it can sometimes be tedious and complicated to configure your email, especially because email is available on so many different devices and machines. It can also be downright frustrating dealing with things like mail servers and ports. That’s where our new Auto Mail Config Tool can help!

Auto Mail Config Tool: Step 1

Auto Mail Config Tool: Step 2

This new Auto Mail Config Tool automatically configures your email in some of the most popular email clients, like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook and more. Simply enter your email address in the Tool, choose your email client, and you can be reading and sending emails in minutes.

We’ve also added the ability to set up mail on your iPhone with a text message or QR Code! This will work automatically for all of our (gs) Grid-Service customers, and there’s a simple 1-step process to use the tool on our other hosting products.

If you would rather do the set up yourself or if you need help setting up an email address on your service, feel free to check out one of our helpful KnowledgeBase articles.

As always, if you have any questions, we are here 24/7.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today.

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.

2. What were you doing before you started Cowbird?
I spent 2+ years living like a hermit in small cabins in various far-flung corners of the world (Iceland, Oregon, New Mexico, Vermont, California) writing the 145,000+ lines of code that are the basis for Cowbird.

Before that, I lived in Brooklyn, New York, where I made a number of projects like We Feel Fine (a search engine for human emotions), I Want You To Want Me (an exploration of online dating), The Whale Hunt (an unconventional documentary about an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt), Balloons of Bhutan (a portrait of happiness in the last Himalayan kingdom), and 10×10 (an hourly snapshot of global media coverage).

Starting on my 30th birthday, I began documenting my life with one photo and short story a day.

In one way or another, all my work has been about evolving the art of storytelling.

3. What’s next for Cowbird?
We plan to spend 2012 slowly growing our community of storytellers, keeping very focused on quality and substance.

We really see Cowbird as a soulful oasis within the fast food / shopping mall landscape of the Internet.

We’re trying to create a space on the Web that can foster self-reflection and deeper connection, being a force of compassion in the world.

4. What are your favorite Cowbird stories?
There are so many stories that just take your breath away.
Here are a few of my favorites:

• It’s Cecily, Darling – a woman remembers her sister on the 10th anniversary of her suicide.
• 1000 Words – a man tells the story of his French lover, who he met on Flickr.
• Thank You Taliban – a war photographer marries his girlfriend on a graveyard of Russian tanks in Afghanistan, hours after facing death.
• Frank – a famous pianist keeps playing at age 95.
• That would make it so easy – a young boy on an airplane reflects on his divorced parents.
• Do you ever put them on – a surreal encounter at a holiday party

5. What are three sites you visit daily?
The New York Times, Twitter, Cowbird

6. (mt) Vital Stats
Domain: http://cowbird.com
(mt) Hosting Service: VPS (ve) Server
Years with (mt): 1.5

We’re sending two lucky winners to Austin in true VIP style. Travel and hotel are on us. The best part is you’ll have access to VIP industry events and be treated like a rock star for the duration of the trip.

Enter to win on our Facebook page!

Good luck y’all.

Special thanks to Roxanne Daner for the fantastic artwork.

By now, you probably know how we feel about Internet blacklist legislation. While it is not typically our style to talk politics, the nature of these bills directly impacts the very industry that Media Temple and many of you have a huge role in. The outcome will potentially affect our jobs, livelihood, and for many of us, our biggest passion.

Tomorrow, many sites will go dark for 24 hours in protest of the SOPA/PIPA acts being pushed through Congress. There are many ways that you can show your support for freedom of the Internet. Whether you want to blackout your site, or take a more modest approach, here are some tips on how to show where you stand.

Blackout Your Site

You can accomplish a “blackout” of your site by simply altering your main index page. While you can input whatever content you’d like (or no content at all!), Zachary Johnson has a great blackout example here. You can find his code on Github.

Enable CloudFlare’s stop_sensorship App

Our friends at CloudFlare have an app available that is built to help you take a stance in a creative way. Visitors to a site with the app enabled will see a censored version of the page, with words longer than five characters blacked out. If you are a (mt) customer, you can enable CloudFlare in the AccountCenter.

Redirect Your Site

Another way to participate is by redirecting your site by editing your .htaccess file, or using our handy Redirect Domains tool in the AccountCenter. You might want to consider redirecting to an organization that shares your stance. We like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Change Your Profile Picture

blackoutsopa.org provides an easy way to display that you are not a fan of the big bad SOPA/PIPA. You can use these badges in place of your usual social media profile pictures.

Our CEO Demian Sellfors has stated that he does not support the censorship of the “freedom and openness of the Internet”. If you agree, then help stop Internet blacklist legislation. Feel free to comment with your favorite examples or other helpful information.

They say “it’s the most wonderful time of the year.” We agree! To help celebrate the Holidays, we’re going to help give you a jump start to the new year. If your New Year’s Resolution is to move your sites to a shiny new home, you’ve got to check out these deals!

In addition to the (mt) Serious Sale, we’re bringing back $5 domains and taking 10% off of our brand new migration service, SiteMover! Until January 1, you can purchase or transfer any .com, .net, .org or .info domain for only $5. New customers can initiate a purchase from mediatemple.net, or call us. Existing customers can open a support request or give us a call. The $5 deal is good for the first year of registration, and costs $12 for renewal.

If you can’t wait to get your sites on (mt) but don’t quite have the time to devote to a migration, let us do the work for you! Our brand new SiteMover service provides website migrations powered by humans. For a limited time, we’re taking 10% off of the SiteMover fee!

Give your sites a new home for 2012. $5 domains and 10% off of SiteMover with coupon code: newhome2012

We believe in maintaining the freedoms and openness of the Internet which provides a voice to the aspirations of people everywhere.

Demian Sellfors, CEO, (mt) Media Temple
@demian_sellfors

As written, (mt) Media Temple will not be supporting the legislative measures recently introduced in the United States House of Representatives and Senate; HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). More work is required in order to achieve a balance which controls online piracy while continuing to promote innovation, job creation, and free expression.

Interested in being involved? A great way to start is by sharing your own opinions with your local representatives here: Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

You asked for it, and it’s coming! Today, we are happy to debut a new chat feature to help you communicate with us even easier than ever before. The new chat bar sits at the bottom of your screen in the AccountCenter and allows you to chat with our Customer Support and Billing departments. To get started, just click on the chat icon and you’ll be chatting with one of our customer service agents within moments! There are also icons built-in for contacting us via Skype and accessing our Twitter and Facebook pages, so don’t forget to check those out.

Not everyone will have access to the chat bar today. For now, we are rolling this out to about 10% of our customers. To see if it is available to you just log in to your AccountCenter. Stay tuned, as we’ll be expanding this percentage over the next few months. Chat is open from 9am to 5pm Pacific Time, Monday through Friday. We’ll be looking to expand our chat hours to 24/7 in the future, but in the meantime, early birds or night owls can still reach us via phone or support request 24/7.

If you want to get in contact with one of our Sales agents, there is also sales chat available on the main (mt) Media Temple website.

We’d love to hear what you think about the new chat bar, so please let us know what you think.

We have some good news for (gs) Grid-Service users: We are about to launch our new mail product! As mentioned in our last product update, our new mail product is professional-class mail that is also beautiful and easy to use. Also, (mt) Mail comes at no additional cost for Grid customers!

Here are the feature highlights:

• Beautiful Webmail: Access email, contacts and calendar from a great-looking, but sophisticated mail client.
• Getting Ready for Business: The new email service is designed with an intense infrastructure to deliver fast, supported, business-class email.
• Calendar: With a simple drag-and-drop interface and with CalDAV, you will never miss an appointment again.
• Address Book: Modern contact management that comes in a beautiful interface and supports CardDAV.
• Quality IMAP Support: Proven software stack, reliable IMAP connections that you’ll love.

Here are the launch details:

Starting next week and continuing over the next few months, we’ll be enabling (mt) Mail in a staggered fashion. This means that some users will have access to Mail next week, while others won’t see it for a few months. While the new mail product will launch in phases, all Grid users will see a new webmail login page starting today. This new, cleaner webmail login page is just the start of our changes. We’re slowly enabling Mail so that we can monitor and track the experience.

Once you are able to access the new (mt) Mail, we’ll migrate all of your existing mail, address book contacts and other various settings over to the new product. If you choose not to use our new Mail product, for a limited time, you will be able to continue to use any of the legacy webmail clients that we support today. Please note that that within the next 6 months, we plan to eliminate these old clients and, eventually, we will be migrating everyone over to the new Mail. We encourage you to take the leap now.

We appreciate your patience with our phased rollout. We know that you’re excited to have access to this new product and we can’t wait to get it into your hands.

Until December 25th, January 1, you will get 25% off an annual purchase of our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server 512MB and 1GB plans. The best part is the 25% applies to the life of the service. That’s serious.

Promo Codes:
(dv) 512MB: dvnotholiday512
(dv) 1GB: dvnotholiday1gb

Copy and paste the promo code and get your (dv) now.

The (dv) is our premium VPS hosting service perfect for small businesses and critical projects.

This promotion applies to new services only.

Our friends at WordPress have released Version 3.3, aka “Sonny,” — named to honor the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt. Check out the highlights below, but take care to read this entire article for directions on upgrading. This is another great update that you won’t want to miss.

Highlights

• New drag-and-drop uploader.
• Hover menus for the navigation.
• New toolbar.
• Improved co-editing support.
• New Tumblr importer.
• Friendly welcome message for first-time users, and revamped help tabs throughout the interface.
• Improved dashboard experience for the iPad and other tablets with touch support.
• Check out the full story on the 3.3 Codex Page, or read the WordPress News

Important Requirements!

• PHP 5.2.4 or higher
• MySQL 5.0.15 or greater

How do I update?

In order to update to WordPress 3.3 your site needs to be running at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.14. Don’t know what those are? No problem.

1. To make sure you’re using the latest version of PHP 5, follow these instructions. Any new site created on your (gs) will use the latest stable version of PHP (5.3+), but older sites might be running a lesser, incompatible version and these will need to be updated before installing WordPress 3.3.
2. Sites that are on (gs) Clusters 4,5,6,7,8 or 9 are already using MySQL 5. Some (gs) Grid-Service sites that use MySQL containers on Clusters 1, 2 or 3 may need to upgrade their databases. First, find out what Cluster your (gs) resides on. From there, you can discover what version of MySQL you are using inside of PHPMyAdmin. If you need to upgrade, please enter a support request from your AccountCenter.
3. (mt) users who already have WordPress, you can update using your wp-admin panel.
4. If you don’t have WordPress installed on your (mt) server just yet, we provide a 1-Click installer in the AccountCenter for (gs) users, and (dv) users can install from their Application Catalog.

We’d love to help if you have any questions. Feel free to call us at (877) 578-4000 for support.