Utopian.net is happy to announce that Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody and Tim Hamilton, who’ve both been working in the Labs on Utopian.net research projects, will now be lending their considerable individual skills to external development work as well, to help us get more done, faster, for clients.

Specifically, Tim will be helping with HTML/CSS detailing and web image processing, as well as working extensively on documentation and education. Nathaniel is a PHP coder with enough LISP experience to challenge the source code status quo, and he’ll be diving deep into the software that runs several of our projects and products.

In a great example of Utopians helping Utopians, hosting customer and Labs moonlighter Tim Hamilton has whipped up a couple screencasts showing how to make the changes to your SMTP server port settings described in our last post. If your ISP is blocking your outbound port 25, Tim has videos for both Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird that will help you send outgoing mail on port 587 instead.

Tim happens to be a Windows® user; we’re working on a screencast for Apple Mail to add soon.

Note that if your ISP is not creating problems sending your domain’s email through Utopian.net SMTP servers on the usual port 25 (and very few customers have run into this so far), then this post, and these screencasts, do not apply to you. If you’re not having problems sending email, no change is needed. If you are having problems with SMTP on port 25, closely read the posts tagged with RFC 2476, and carefully watch Tim’s appropriate screencast for your email client, before changing any settings.

If you need more help with Utopian.net email service for your domain, contact support@utopian.net.

We’ve seen more of our customers running into silly port 25 blocks thrown up by their home ISPs. Some of the ISPs that practice this, and an explanation of the problem, are here: http://blog.dreamhosters.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=1623.

If your ISP is blocking port 25 and you’re seeing error messages like “mail.example.com not responding” or “not found” when trying to send messages through your domain’s Utopian.net SMTP server, you can change your email client settings to send outgoing mail to the SMTP server on port 587 instead of the usual port 25. Port 587 is the internet-standard submission service port, defined by RFC 2476.

Using port 587 for SMTP should allow you to send mail from your domain (once you’ve authenticated as usual with your email username and password), even in situations where your outbound port 25 is blocked.

Then you can use your restored access to mail your ISP and tell them how little you appreciate them censoring your network access without even asking.

Seems appropriate for the Official Utopian.net news blog to announce its own launch. Utopian.net customers and partners can get major announcements, system status, upgrade schedules, and try out new features and services here at http://labs.utopian.net/blogs/utopian/, or via RSS at http://labs.utopian.net/blogs/utopian/feed/.

Utopian.net Leitmotif provides complete WordPress themes matching the detailed designs of the artists we strive to serve. It got an official name and a mini-launch today, which you can see in the differences at the Utopian.net services page, and in the how-to documentation for creating your Leitmotif site design.

We’ve added some more tips and explanations we think will be helpful, especially for new users just getting started with a site hosted at Utopian.net. The biggest changes are at http://utopian.net/doc/web/wp/, for using WordPress to manage your site and your blog; all utopian.net documentation can be found under http://utopian.net/doc/.

You might notice we’ve made some minor but important updates at the main Utopian.net web site. While the front page retains the classic look adopted when we launched it in 2003 (how’s that for design longevity?), the rest of the pages feature an even-more-simple single column layout. Many of those content pages are new or significantly updated, like:

• A page about our company and the people who work there (right now just a blurb about each of the principals, but more coming soon.)
• A little more detail on some of our main services
• Updated info on the software we use
• Documentation for using utopian.net email with your domain

We’re also working hard on our buildguide, a tutorial for using our WordPress cms-themeing service. It’s cool, but it’s not complete, and (like this blog) is living at the labs while under development.