How to Setup Your Own Blog with WordPress

What is a blog?

Blog or weblog is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. It is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites. Blogs may contain a single category such as web development, electronic gadgets, love and relationship or it could be a combination of two or more.

Common sections found in blogs

A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
An archive of older articles.
A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
One or more “feeds” like RSS, Atom or RDF files.
Now that you have a basic idea what a blog is, let us talk about how to setup a wordpress for your blog. But first lets see the requirements.

Below are the prerequisites before you can use WordPress

1. Your web host must support PHP scripts. WordPress is written in PHP so you should see to it that your host have PHP installed. Check also the version of the PHP against the recommended PHP version that your WordPress will use.

2. Database. See to it that you have at least 1 MySQL database. All your blogs/contents will be stored in tables inside the database.

3. Optionally, it is preferable to have your host run Apache on Linux. Although WordPress runs on other web servers, you have many more options on how you can configure the structure of your site and the links (or “permalinks”) to your pages if your site runs on Apache.

How to Install WordPress

1. Download the latest WordPress software and unzip it if it is a zipped file.

2. Locate the wp-config.php or wp-config-sample.php if the former is not present. Then look at this set of codes.

define(’DB_NAME’, ”);
define(’DB_USER’, ”);
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”);
define(’DB_HOST’, ”);

DB_NAME = name of the database
DB_USER = Mysql database username
DB_PASSWORD = Mysql database password
DB_HOST = Mysql hostname

You may ask assistance from your web host tech support to get the values needed above. After modifying those lines, save the file as wp-config.php

3. Upload all the files to your web host. This will take long specially if your internet connection speed is slow.

4. After uploading all those files open your browser and go to www.domainname.com/wp-admin/install.php. Change “domainname” to your own domain name.

5. Follow the instructions that you will see on each page.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed WordPress. You can start posting to your blog by going to www.domainname.com/wp-login.php, logging in in with the “admin” user name and the password supplied to you earlier and following the instructions given on that page.

Few Blogging Tips

Post regularly, but don’t post if you have nothing worth posting about.
Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.
Don’t put ’subscribe’ and ‘vote me’ links all over the front page until you have people that like your blog enough to ignore them (they’re usually just in the way).
Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.
Enjoy, blog for fun, comment on other peoples’ blogs (as they normally visit back).

More tutorials can be found at Shoutbux