Wow my first post…. This site is run by WordPress so I will discuss briefly how I set it up…..


Background (Where to host your blog….)

I use a company called http://ixwebhosting.com/ to host my projects these days. So when I discovered WordPress was available I installed it from their control panel. This makes it sound like my hosting company is offering this service but the reality is that WordPress is free. I didn’t understand all of this until I did a bit of research.  Go to WordPress.org’s About Page to get a better understanding of what it is.

One thing about having a hosting company that is good is it allows you to have your own URL for your blog. You pay the hosting company to be your own personal computer for when people type in your web address.  In a way it is kind of like having a secretary.  If someone calls your company(types in your address www.soandso.com) your secretary(hosting company) can be there to answer there questions and tell them about your company.  In order to have your blog from your own URL like

www.myname.com

you first need to have some kind of hosting with a company. Most hosting packages include php support and that is what you will need. So your files sit on their computer and whenever someone goes to your site your hosting company shows the files for you. One other thing to mention about hosts is that it would be easier if you chose a Linux based host instead of windows as the WordPress software seems to be more compatible with it. There are work arounds but as I discuss in this other post about permalinks…. windows hosting can give you some problems.


About WordPress

WordPress is a web application that utilizes php (programming language).  Really it is just a website (set of webpages) that allows you to build your own blog and it’s free.  So when I said above

I installed it from their control panel.

what that entailed was simply me pressing a button and my hosting company copying some files to a directory for me plus a few other things(creating a database and tables). Yes, all you have to do to get this up and running is simply copy over the files to your websites file directory and go…well not exactly.

For some there may be a bit more to do see the section entitled “The Ease of Installation and the wp-config.php file” for further information on what you should do to install this.

As I said, for me, my host set up some of the things for me when I pressed a button but I still had some issues.  I explain in the “Installation Problems“ section of this article what went wrong.  These issues pertain specifically to my installation with my hosting company ixwebhosting but perhaps others can learn from my mistakes.


WordPress Themes

WordPress has many cool themes to choose from so that you can make blog quite personal and looking good. Since the default theme seemed boring I looked around and found a couple themes I liked. Basically setting the themes up is also a matter of copying your theme to a directory. Again just copy over the files and you can administer the whole site with the webpages they provide for you. Themes live in (wp-content/themes). This is in the root directory for your blog. My blog lives at:

http://dotnetofasp.net/howtoblog/

so the themes are located at:

http://dotnetofasp.net/howtoblog/wp-content/themes

This is where I started to run into problems.  It wasn’t the biggest problem but still a problem.  Below I outlined how I fixed the problem with the themes and other issues I had.


Installation Problems

My two main issues that caused me errors with my WordPress configuration were:

  • Themes not Working
  • Permalinks not Working


Themes not Working

I encountered some setup problems when I tried to use the themes that I uploaded to the themes folder. They showed up on the admin pages of my WordPress blog but whenever I tried to activate these new themes the whole website disappeared!!!! Everything…. I could not see the admin section or my blog… They were blank pages… Since they were blank I had to delete all the files and start over again so I could see the admin pages again.

The problem was I was running an older version of WordPress I found out. My hosting company had “installed” a very old version of WordPress(2.2). Basically they copied over an older set of files. Now the latest beta version is up to 2.9. something and the stable version is 2.8.6 which is what this blog is using. The moral is make sure you have the latest and greatest version before copying your files.

So I downloaded the latest version of WordPress and using FTP software(I use GlobalSCAPE) I uploaded it.

If you don’t have FTP software then you can use internet explorer to do this. Just type:

ftp://username:password@yourURL.com

into the address bar of internet explorer.  This may work for other browsers but I know it works for Internet Explorer.

I also took a look at these upgrading instructions because I wanted to make sure I did it right. However, I am happy to report this was very easy to do. A lot easier than I expected. I simply erased all the old files(except wp-config.php) and uploaded the new. The instructions tell you how to upgrade WordPress and in that case you have to save a few of the files but I just needed a brand new copy of the latest version.


Permalinks not Working

Pages Don’t Show Up – 404 Error – Not Found

What really drew me to WordPress were the permalinks.  At first I didn’t know what they were called but I had seen them URL’s on the web and knew they could be powerful for search engines.  I turned this feature on for my blog from the dashboard immediately.

The problem I had was once I got everything looking good on the homepage, my other pages weren’t showing up.  I kept getting the error message above:      Pages Don’t Show Up – 404 Error – Not Found

This was extremely frustrating. At first I thought there was not a work around for this because my hosting is Windows and apparently the feature of permalinks works better with Linux hosts. There is however a work around and I mention it on this post entitled “WordPress Permalinks: Getting It Right Using Windows“.


The Ease of Installation and the wp-config.php file

A couple times I talked about how easy this was to install. Upon reading something I ran across I had a thought. One thing my hosting company did do for me with that simple click of the button is they set up my wp-config.php file. This has your database connections in it and does not come with the files you download off the net. I tried to run WordPress without this file and it prompted me, even asking me if I wanted to create one so perhaps creating this on your own is not so bad with their wizard.

With a push of a button my database tables were also created. That is nice. If you don’t have that luxury this install could be a bit harder. Perhaps you would have to get the table definitions for the database from WordPress’s site.  Since my tables were setup for me I did not have to worry about this.  Along thing is that luckily WordPress’s site is awesome for support. Here are a few helpful links:

About the wp-config.php file (Editing-Creating-Etc.)

Installing WordPress


Final Comments

So far so good. I think WordPress and I will have a long relationship. It is simple to use and also has scalability(widgets and other add-ons people are coming up with everyday). I suggest it to anyone wanting to blog.