How-To set up your own blog

I’ve been asked by a number of people about how I started my blog and for help to start theirs.  Most of them had used online sites like Blogger or something like that, but like me they wanted to host their own blog.

So here’s a helper for everyone – there may be some mistakes here, and what is here, may not be the best service for everyone – it is simply what I did. Continue at your own risk – that’s my disclaimer!

• A host which supports PHP and MySQL
• Ftp access to your host
• Downloads of WordPress, PhpMyAdmin

• ALWAYS best to read the docs at http://www.phpmyadmin.net/documentation/#setup

here’s the quick run through

• unzip the phpMyAdmin installation into a temp directory on your local server
• edit the config.inc.php file.  In the ‘Server configuration’ section,  enter the correct values for host, auth_type, user, and password.  I used ‘http’ for my auth_type since i didn’t want my username password sitting in the file, but you could also use ‘config’. You shouldn’t need to change any other values.
• ftp the phpMyAdmin zip contents up to your server (**Important! make sure you password protect your directories!! use the .htaccess files in Apache)
• open the file ‘http://www.yourhost.com/yourinstalldir/index.php – you should now be able to manipulate your mysql installation.  Be careful! you can really mess things up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

• the easiest way to do this is to simply follow the Famous 5–Minute Install

 it is here as well with some additional info 

• unzip the wordpress installation into a temp directory on your local machine
• Log into your installation of phpMyAdmin and navigate to the index.php
• In the main window, select ‘Databases’, and create a new database for your blog – you can name it anything that you want.  Don’t worry about adding tables or the structure
• Next we need to create a user.  Navigate back to the index by selecting correct home icon in the left hand frame.
• Select ‘Privileges’, then ‘Add a New User’, and then fill in the appropriate fields – initially it will be fine to grant all privileges to the new user.  Alternatively, you can grant none and then edit the user to have table specific rights.
• In your unzipped wordpress directory, copy the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php
• edit the wp-config.php file to have the database, user, and pwd values created in the previous steps.
• check that you entered the correct values in the last step!!
• ftp to your host and copy the contents of the above temp directory to your remote host
• rename the name of the copied directory to one that you prefer (mine is thefunkstop). Or if you want it in your root – just copy the contents of the wordpress directory directly to the root dir.
• Finally, install the wordpress by accessing the install.php file.  Use your browser to go to ‘http://www.yourhost.com/dirname/wp-admin/install.php’  where ‘www.yourhost.com’ is your hostname and ‘dirname’ is the optional subdirectory.
• Voila!  you should be done.

• ensure that you password protect ALL directories that should not be accessible to others.

That’s my quick tutorial on creating your own blog.  Obviously, this is just the most basic service – in the future, i’ll put some basic info on how to make basic modifications/additions to your site.