I am writing a manual on how to start your own blog because of the requests I got in the last few months. The first step was to get a domain and hosting. After this we are now going to run the (open source) blogging software on the domain.
There are a lot of different free tools you can use to build a blog. The most popular ones are Pivot and WordPress (Movable Type has an open source beta release now). I prefer WordPress because of the large active community and the number of plugins that are available. I never used other open source blogging software, but I would recommend WordPress to everyone.
Setting up a WordPress blog is really easy, even if you don’t know much about Internet/PHP/MySQL and all the things you are going to use. The installation guide basically tells you everything. Here is a short summary to see how easy it is:
- Install an FTP program like Filezilla (windows) or Cyberduck (mac).
- Make sure you have a text editor (even better would be a HTML editor like Nvu).
- Download and unzip the WordPress package.
- Create a database (MySQL) for WordPress on your server, if you use direct admin this can be done wih only one click.
- Open wp-config-sample.php in your text editor and fill in the database details.
- Safe this file with the name wp-config.php.
- Upload the WordPress files with your FTP client.
- Run the WordPress installation script by typing www.thedomain.com/wp-admin/install.php in your web browser.
- That’s it! WordPress should now be installed.
You can choose to install WordPress in your root directory but it’s also possible to use a subdirectory (pietervangils.com/weblog/) or subdomain (blog.pietervangils.com). If you have questions about this leave a reply on this post or send me an email.
