Episode: 927
Title: HPR0927: Setting up a WordPress blog: part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0927/hpr0927.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:04:10

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Hello, this is Frank Bell. I'm back and this time I'm starting my mini series on how to set up a WordPress blog.
I don't know how many episodes this will be at this point, probably two or three.
I'm trying to keep episodes within the time frame of 15 minutes to half an hour.
And I don't really know how a particular one will go until I actually do a run through of it.
And yes, I do do run through because I don't want to make a complete and total hash of the ideas I'm trying to express.
My experience is all with WordPress, so that's what I will talk about.
There are two ways to start a blog if you're interested in shooting your mouth off on the internet as I was.
One way is to go to a blogging site such as blogspot or blogger.com, both of which these days redirect to a Google sign-on or type pad or WordPress.com and sign up to start a blog.
And the blogging site then will do everything you need. You'll be signed up, you'll have a database, you'll be ready to go.
All you might want to do is to tailor the theme and some of the settings somewhat as regards comments and title and so on and so forth.
There's also tumblr.com, that's T-U-M-B-L-R, Tango, Uniform, Mike, Beta, Lima, Romeo, relatively new on the scene, the host of a number of interesting blogs, but it seems to be a walled garden.
At near as I can determine, you must have a tumblr account if you want to post a comment, they call them notes, to a tumblr blog.
I personally don't find that appealing and I would recommend against roping yourself into something of that sort, but that's just me.
The other way to start a blog is to get your own domain and configure your blog from the bottom up. That's what I did and that's what I'm going to talk about.
In my last episode here at Hacker Public Radio, I talked about getting my own free domain and free DNS from noip.com and that is the domain from which I started blogging.
The process of setting up a WordPress blog, I have broken down quite arbitrarily into four parts.
Part one is to prepare the database. Part two is to install the WordPress software. Part three is to configure the appearance and feel of the site and part four would be maintaining the site.
In this episode, I will talk about the first two items, preparing the database and installing WordPress.
Before I go on, I have to say that the documentation at WordPress.org is excellent.
The WordPress codex, the link will be in the show notes, gives very good guidance about how to do this.
Now, I was self-hosting. I had what's called shell access to the server. I could sit down at the keyboard and do anything I wanted because it was my computer and my guest room.
So, when I talk about copying files into place, I used the CP command or a file manager.
When you talk about copying files in place on a hosting service, you would be using FTP to move the files from your local computer to the remote hosting service.
But it's still copying. I'll try to catch any differences I know of between FTP and shell access as I go along.
But if I miss one, be sure to hold my feet to the fire and correct me.
Now, the first thing you need is a database. I was going to be using my SQL.
Fortunately, I knew a little bit about SQL because my employer at the time used crystal reports as the underlying database engine for one of their flagship applications.
So, I at least was not dealing with a foreign language. I was in the position of someone who, if I were learning French, I could say at least I had heard someone speak French before.
That doesn't mean I understood a word of it, but I knew at least that it was French and not Italian or Spanish or some other language.
And I do view SQL as a foreign language. If you're an English speaker, SQL looks like English, but it's got its own rules, its own grammar, its own vocabulary, and its own syntax, and they are unforgiving.
What you need to do first to prepare for installing WordPress is to create a database for WordPress to use.
I hunted around in the MySQL documentation on the MySQL site, and I found the instructions for logging into MySQL, and I found the instructions for creating a database.
In this case, I called my database Wind, because I figured whatever else my blog would probably be, a big blast of hot air.
You also need a MySQL user to administer the database. It is best not to administer the database as the MySQL route.
It is better to have a subordinate user who has complete rights over that particular database, but not over anything else in your MySQL world.
So I found out how to create a user and grant privileges. I'm not going to try to resurrect the commands.
I've lost the notes that I have made at the time, but a web search will turn them up in a number of different locations.
In addition, if you're doing this on a hosting service, you will almost certainly have PHP MyAdmin, and have a graphical front end for administering MySQL.
And in PHP MyAdmin, you can log in as route, you can create a database, and then you can create a user and grant that user rights over that database.
One oddity in PHP MyAdmin, the place that you create a new user is referred to as privileges on the menu.
And inside the privileges area, there's a place to create the users and assign privileges to them.
I personally would find it more intuitive if that menu item said users, but is not my program. I just use it. I don't write it, so I can live with it.
You do not need to create any tables. WordPress will do that for you.
And another footnote. If you are using a hosting provider, you will likely have PHP MyAdmin as a graphical front end for administering MySQL.
And in that case, you can use the PHP MyAdmin front end to create your database, to create the database user, and to grant the database user rights over that database.
If you are doing so, I would strongly recommend that you create the user, log out, then try to log back as that user, and make sure that user log in is working before you go to the next step, up granting rights.
If you are using a hosting provider who provides automatic installation of WordPress, the hosting provider will create the database, will create the user, and ask you to create a password for that user, at least my hosting provider did.
Others may create a password and give you a provisional password, and say change this after first use. You do not need to create the tables. WordPress will do this when it connects to the database.
The next step is to install WordPress, assuming your hosting provider has not done that for you. You would download the archive from the WordPress.org site, not from WordPress.com. WordPress.org is all about the WordPress blogging or CMS software. WordPress.com is all about existing WordPress blogs and utilities for existing blogs.
You would download the archive, and the instructions for how to install it are quite easy. WordPress calls it their famous five-step install. The first time I did it, I think it turned into seven or eight steps, but they call it their five-step install and have very easy to follow links to find the instructions.
When it's decompressed, you will have the top-level directory that contains the PHP files, which will manage the display of the content to the visitor.
That, for example, is where your index.php file is located, sidebar.php and so on and so forth. There will be a WP hyphen admin directory, and that's where the PHP files that allow you to manage the administrative test, do the configuration and stuff like that are located.
There is a WP hyphen content directory, and that's where you will place your themes, plugins, and content that you upload through the WordPress uploader will go in there, among other things.
The way it works, basically, is once you have a theme selected, the items say the index.php and the top-level directory calls your selected theme as defined in your configuration and then displays it in accordance with the instructions given by that theme.
And there is a WP hyphen includes directory, which includes a lot of utilities and other functions that are necessary for all the other stuff to happen.
To do your configuration for installation, the file you need to concentrate on is called WP hyphen, c-o-n-f-i-g.php. That is located in the top-level WordPress directory.
And in it, there are several items which you need to configure and some which you can configure. These include the name of your MySQL database.
The actual item is alcapsdb underscore name. You enter the name of your database in which case I entered wind.
You enter the login of your database user, exactly as you would type it into the login box or the login line for MySQL or the login box for PHP MyAdmin.
And you enter the password for the database user.
The fourth item you must configure is db underscore host. You must tell WordPress where to find your database.
When I was doing this way back that first time since the database was on my local computer, all I had to enter there was local host.
Had it been on another computer within my network, I would have to have pointed WordPress to that.
If you are using a hosting service and doing this yourself, your hosting provider will provide you with the information that goes into this line.
There are also items for changing your database character set, your database collation, and the language if you wanted something other than English.
I have never had any reason to touch any of these. And in the more recent versions of WordPress, there is something called secret keys.
The secret keys are designed to make the cookies that WordPress will drop onto the computers of people who log in as users or registrants for the log.
More secure, the WP config PHP file is very well annotated and it contains a link to WordPress site where you can generate secret keys.
So once I had this all configured up, I installed this to my document root directory where my website resides.
Since I already had two other subdirectories for two different websites that I was running under there, they were all my websites but they were about different topics.
I created a third subdirectory for my blog and copied WordPress over into that location.
And now the test. I pointed my browser at, in my case, localhost slash WP hyphen admin slash WP hyphen install.php.
If all goes well, WordPress configures your database and pops up a message telling you that the installation was successful.
If things don't go well, and WordPress says something like, I can't find your database, who are you anyway?
I actually think the actual wording is fail to create database connection. It's one of the most dreaded error messages a blogger can ever fear seeing.
You need to go back and check the settings in WP config.php.
And once you have it working, you are set up. You've got WordPress installed running with the default theme.
That is the biggest top, the first top, the important top. You got the darn thing working.
What's left is to configure up some settings and work on the look and feel.
I won't talk about all the settings. There are some settings, which I would consider a part of basic setup.
And they are found on the WordPress dashboard. That's their term, not mine, by clicking settings and then clicking general.
And they include these, the title. And by typing in the title, that enables the existing PHP file to display the title at whatever location is dictated by the theme you're using.
A tagline or motto, it might be better things for better living through computers or exploring all things geek or whatever would fit for you.
Mine is a city boy will never learn everything a country boy knows by instinct. A country boy will learn everything a city boy knows in six months.
Because I am a country boy. The blog address and site address. And this is important so that when somebody clicks on a link to say they want to look at a post or make a comment and they click on the post title to look at it in more detail, they get redirected to the correct location.
This is especially important if you are moving your blog from one location to another. This must be corrected. You may also need to update it in the database, but that's not part of initial setup.
The email address, your email address that you want WordPress to send you emails to date and time format, whether you want it to be 23 June 2013 or June 23rd 2013, your UTC time zone, your time zone plus or minus from the observatory and Greenwich.
And whether or not people can register if they do register what is their initial status as just a subscriber of their several possible levels that you can configure.
In my case I turned off automatic registration. If someone wants to register and they click the register item on the public menu, they will get a paste telling them that I have turned it off.
I have turned it off because I have gotten too many spam registrations. I don't think that StripTee's webcam or a sexy girl really planned ever to contribute anything positive to my blog if indeed they ever intended to visit a second time.
And since mine is just a personal, very idiosyncratic, hobbyist blog, which I use to shoot my mouth off, registration really doesn't gain anyone anything.
The comments are open and unless you want to actually be added as someone who can write post, there's no reason whatsoever for someone to need to register to have full functionality.
Those are the settings that I would consider essential at, if you will, time of first run, the settings on the general page.
There are numerous other settings that you can configure settings for writing post, settings for reading post, settings for discussion or commenting on post.
The settings pages are well annotated and described and before you bring the thing live that is an answer to the public, you can experiment around a little and see what the changes do to the appearance of the public face of the blog or to the functionality as you do test post, test comments and the like.
And I would recommend strongly testing the thing out.
What I do now, if I want to make a change or redesign my theme, I run a ZAMP server on one of my local computers.
I fire up ZAMP, the link will be in the show notes, make the changes under ZAMP without them being exposed to the internet and that way I can break them to my heart's content and not go out and break my actual running blog that I keep hoping people will visit from time to time.
And that is it, that is the basic setup, create the database, create a database user, copy the software into place and configure the wpconfig.php file and fire it up, then do a few basic settings.
In the next episode, I'll talk about some of the things I have encountered in trying to configure the appearance and the feel of my blog.
If you would like to visit my blog and see what it looks like now, you are welcome to, but before warned, as I mentioned, it is very idiosyncratic and extremely outspoken.
The URL is www.pineviewform.net. It was named after the farm where I grew up where there were lots of pine trees and that was what my father's name for the farm was, Pine View Farm.
If you want to contact me directly, you can email me at www.pineviewform.net.
And until I talk to you again, thank you very much.
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