Facibus On Blogging

This is the fifth in a series of get a real blog posts, designed to help you make the jump to self-hosted blogging (if that’s what you want to do).

Installing blog software can be easy - or it can be not so easy. The ease of installation depends entirely on your choice of blogging platform and whether your hosting provider offers this particular platform as a one-click option or not.

As I said earlier, I do not have a vested interest in you choosing mediatemple.net over any other hosting provider - they are mentioned as an example only.

The following examples use WordPress on Linux hosting as an example - the basic principles are fairly applicable to the installation of any blog platform on any server operating system.

The easy way
The easy way, it has to be said, is to find a hosting provider with one click no-fuss installation. While it takes a little more than a single click, it is a lot easier than the alternative.

Here’s how it works. Selecting the one-click application list inside the control panel lets you choose from the available options - in my case, this is Drupal, Zen Cart and WordPress. Selecting WordPress gives you this screen:

I’ve entered the path that I want WordPress installed to (at the root of domain name intrapreneurblog.com, not in a subdomain or a subdirectory), the database I want used (a general WordPress database called wp_) and the database table prefix that I want used (wp_ipblog_). The database and table names matter - you can get into trouble where you have two or more applications working from the same server that use the same database and table name - things get overwritten and messy in a big hurry. So the trick is this - either use a separate database for each blog, or make sure that at least the table name is unique.

After clicking on install I need to confirm that I want WordPress to overwrite everything in the existing directory structure of intrapreneurblog.com - which I do. I then click on a Finish icon that opens this screen in a new browser tab/window:

After clicking on the big friendly Install WordPress icon, the following appears:

The next steps are easy - log in, change the admin password, and start tweaking the blog (and we’ll cover that in the next article in this series).

The hard way
The hard way isn’t a lot harder than the easy way - once you’ve done both. The hard way involves:

• Downloading your blog platform software and unzipping it to your local hard disk: you may have some built-in archiving applications as part of your hosting package that allow you to upload a single zip/tar file and unarchive it in place - or maybe you have command line access to your server and can do it that way. Apart from this, you’ll be downloading the archive (*.zip or *.tar.gz or similar file), unarchiving it on your local machine (i.e. your PC/Mac etc), then FTP transferring the file to your hosting server.
• FTPing the software to your server: FTP is File Transfer Protocol - the way that files used to be universally moved around the internet (and around local Unix/Linux/*nix systems). It is still handy for copying files between the hosting web server and your local machine. There are different FTP applications/clients around - it is hard to recommend one over the other (although FileZilla is a favourite for Windows). To FTP files you will need the FTP address (often something like ftp.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, or yourhostingproviderdomain.com), an FTP username and password, and sometimes a specific directory address. If in doubt, contact your hosting provider’s support area.
• Following the instructions that came with your blog platform to run the install script: This is often as easy as typing in a specific web address - something like http://yourdomain.com/install.php or something similar. Read the instructions that came with your blog platform software - there will often be a file called something like INSTALL. (Note: You may find yourself reading a lot of phrases like “something like” in this article - this is deliberate, as nearly every blog platform package is different in the way it names files and the information that you need to supply for installation).
• When prompted, entering your database server domain address, database user name and password, and the installation directory/file path. It may also require you to set up the database and database tables (or just nominate them as in “the easy way” above).

You can probably imagine that the hard way can be a bit scary the first couple of times. If you try it and get it wrong, you can always delete the blog platform files and start again from scratch (not something to do casually once you’ve started posting, but at this stage it has less impact).

Next: Tweaking the blog.