Let’s begin with some background. My previous attempt at a blog was unsatisfactory to me. I kept forcing myself to post things I really didn’t care much for just for the sake of trying to keep it updated frequently. That led my blog to being more work than anything else. I had more fun tinkering around acquiring the domain name, server space, and installing the software than I did actually updating the blog with news. So after a year of boring unoriginal content I decided to start anew and focus on strictly the fun part. That is the tinkering around. And not just in regards to the blog, but whatever I happen to be working on, no matter how amateurish or useless it may be. Its the digging around in the computer and getting my hands dirty with bits that I love. My blog should reflect that, even if there are hundreds just like it.

Now seeing as how I just went through the steps of creating a new site, it reasonable to make that my first entry. So here we go, how to go about setting up your own WordPress blog:

The easiest way to create a WordPress blog would to goto WordPress.com and setup a free account. Sign up, come up with a title, and just start writing. But I ask you were is the fun in that? If there’s no risk of doing it wrong and breaking the whole damn thing then its no fun at all. So instead of the easy solution we are going to setup the software ourselves on our own web-host.

Before these instructions are going to be of any use, you are going to need your own webspace and domain. I’m not going to cover that here. At least not in this post. So go ahead and get that taken care of first then come back. I’ll wait…

Got it? Great. Let’s continue…

First thing to do is to get yourself the latest copy of WordPress. Get it here.

Click on the orange box to the left of the download page and it will let you safe the latest version of the software. Like anything you download, make note of where you saved it. You’ll need to go there next and decompress the zip file. Everything you got out of that file should be neatly contained in a new folder called “WordPress”.

Grab your favorite FTP application (mines FileZilla) and use it to connect to your webspace. Once connected you’ll need to drag the contents of the “WordPress” folder to the “public_html” folder on your server. If there is no “public_html” folder, it may be “www” or something similair. This is whatever folder that will be viewable to the outside world and is where any website you’ve created goes.

My first mistake here was instead of copying the contents of the WordPress directory and copied the directory itself. Wasn’t a big deal to fix. All I deleted it and started again. If I had left it my blog would’ve been located at mywebsite.com/WordPress/ instead of just mywebsite.com

Uploading the files will take some time. Takes between 5-10 minutes on my cable connection. There is a few hundred files, so just sit back and watched the dialog box in your FTP client scroll by. Seeing all that text zoom by will give you a feeling that you are doing something really damn impressive with your computer.

Once everything has been uploaded, you’ll need to setup an SQL database for WordPress to use.

I should mention that before I tried setting up a blog on my own, the extent of my web-publishing experience ended at writing plain old HTML. Interfacing a webpage with a database was well out of my league. I stared blankly at my screen for a few minutes when I realized I hadn’t the first clue about SQL databases, or how to even set one up. It turns most average web hosting companies make it pretty easy to do.

You web-host should have some sort of control panel to manage your website. If they don’t, find someone who does. You’re life will be simpler. At least until I decide to write about managing your own web server.

Most services I’ve encountered use Cpanel as their control panel interface. And others that I’ve encountered that don’t use Cpanel aren’t too different. So setting up the SQL in Cpanel is what I’m going to cover here.

Your control panel should look in some way like this. Various themes and interfaces will vary quite a bit with different icons and colors, but the options available should be more or less the same as below.

Look through the list and you should find your database manager, usually MySQL. Go ahead and select that.

The next screen will resemble the one below if you are using Cpanel like I am. Hopefully whatever wizard you are using won’t deviate to far from this. Go ahead and pick a name for your database, enter it in the “New Database” field and click on “Create Database”. Will start a line in the table directly below with your newly named database.

The next step will be to create a username to access the database. Don’t worry about coming up with some creative handle, the only thing that will be using this username is the WordPress software. So just pick something you think it will like. You’ll want a good strong password, like you do with everything. Letters, numbers, special characters, etc. You’ll want to make note of it just for reference, you won’t really use it after we set up everything though. Once you’ve come up with your username, password, and have entered them correctly in the appropriate fields, click on “Create User”.

Now at least in Cpanel, you’ll also have to associate this user with the database. Why it doesn’t do it automatically I don’t really know. I’m sure it would make sense if I were a database administrator. But for now this is just the way things are. Select the user name you just created out of the “User” drop down box and select you database out of the “Database” drop down menu and click “Submit”.

When adding this user to your database, you’ll be asked what kind of access to give it to your database. I wanted to make sure this worked so I just select “ALL PRIVILAGES”. If anyone can give me reason not create a more restrictive user I welcome the input. But I know this works.

After you click the “Make Changes” button you’ll be brought back to your main SQL Database management screen, and you’ll notice your database with the associated user is now listed in the table. Congrats! You’ve just finished the hardest part of this tutorial. Now we are ready to return to setting up the WordPress software.

If you point your web browser to http://whateveryoudomainis.com/readme.html, you bring up the included instructions on setting up the WordPress software.

If you take notice, you’ll see we’ve already completed step one. So lets move on to step two. Using the file manager included in your control panel, find the file wp-config-sample.php. The file manager should allow you to rename this file wp-config.php.

Once you’ve created your wp-config file we can edit it. Select it in your file manager and open it with your text editor. Usually accomplished by clicking an icon marked “Edit”, a picture of a pencil, or something along those lines. The file should display similarly to below.

Don’t be intimidated by all the slash marks and semi-colons. Take a close look at it, most of these are english words. Look at lines 3, 4, and 5 of the wp-config.php file, you should see lines that look like:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the databasedefine(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL usernamedefine(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password

See where it says “putyourdbnamehere”? Delete that and put the name of your database that we created earlier in its place. See where it says “usernamehere”? Delete that and put the username we created for the database earlier in its place. Now see where it says “yourpasswordhere”? Can you guess what we are going to put there? If you figured the password for the database user, you’re correct. If you guessed something else you should work on those reasoning skills. Please do that before continuing.

A little further down you’ll find 3 other lines like these:

define(‘AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.define(‘SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.define(‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

Where ever it says “put your unique phrase here” we are going to put in a random string of alpha-numeric characters. I recommend using grc.com/password. Steve Gibson, the operator of the site takes very special care to ensure these that the string of characters you are given are as random as possible. You’ll want to use the bottom of the three rows he shows. The first is too cold, the second is too hot, but the third is just right. Actually the first just doesn’t use the entire available alphabet which is we would like to do. The second has special characters in it, and those can potentially confuse WordPress when we enter them in. The third is like I said before, just right. Go ahead and copy and paste the third into on of the three lines. Refresh the grc.com/password page and get two more text strings for the other two lines. Now save the file and close out the editor.

Believe it or not we are up to step five on the readme.html file for WordPress. The next step is to open in your browser http://whateveryoudomainis.com/wp-admin/install.php. If you’ve done everything right so far then you’ll get the page below. Otherwise you missed something in the tutorial, or I forgot to put something in. If you post a comment I’ll do my best to help you figure it out.

If you’ve successfully made it this far, we are in the home stretch. It’s very hard to screw up from this point on. On this welcome screen you’ll need to enter the name of your blog (if you are unsure we can always change it later) and a valid email address. The valid email is important because it will notify you when new comments are posted, people register users, etc. If you are expecting a busy blog, and not suffering from delusions of grandeur, then you may want to set up a separate email just for your blog. Click “Install WordPress” and you’ll be presented with your administrator login name and password. It is also simultaneously emailed to the address you entered.

If you click “Log In” you’ll be brought to your standard WordPress login page. Put in the username and password you were given and click “Log In”. You’ll be taken to your WordPress dashboard and you’ll see a screen like this.

This is your main screen when working within WordPress. From here you can adjust your login attributes like password and name. You’ll start new posts, customize your page, manage comments all from here. Guess what that means. You’ve finished installing it. Wasn’t too painful, was it? Here’s where I’ll leave you. Go explore how your new blog works. Write a few posts, find some cool plug-ins. We’ll go over how it all works another time. Hope this was tutorial of mine was useful. If you got stuck anywhere, drop a line. I’d be glad to help if you are having any trouble. Till next time.