This weekend I started using a new web hosting provider, as the previous one was having too much downtime for my liking. A WordPress blog consists of
- a lot of PHP files that provide the funtionality,
- the files that have been uploaded to the blog,
- and a MySQL database that stores all posts, pages, and sidebar links.
All this has to be copied to the new web host. To make things easier, I chose a hosting service that also provides cPanel. The steps are rather straightforward and take only a few minutes (depending on the size of your blog), although it took me some hours to figure them out. Read the rest of this entry »
A permalink (short for permanent link) is a permanent URL to a webpage, contrary to a URL that may change between different accesses to the webpage. For example, in the early days of blogging, the URL of a post would change when the post moved from the front page to the archives.
By default, the permalink of a WordPress post is the blog’s URL appended by ?p=N, where N is the post’s unique number, assigned by WordPress. For example, the default permalink of this page is http://michel.wermelinger.ws/chezmichel/?p=103. The URL for a page is not much better: …/?page_id=N. Having numbers in the URLs is not very informative and doesn’t help search engines. Like almost everything else in WordPress, the permalink structure is configurable. Just go to Read the rest of this entry »
If you installed your blog in a separate sub-folder of your domain (as I did), then your blog’s URL will be something like http://yourdomain.org/yourblogname. If you want the main http://yourdomain.org to point to your blog, then you have to go through these steps: Read the rest of this entry »
WordPress posts and pages may include photos, videos, audio clips or a link to any other file we wish to store in our blog. The first thing to decide is where the uploaded files will be stored. The Settings > Miscellaneous administration sub-panel allows us to define in which sub-folder of the blog’s installation folder the files should go. I have kept the default (wp-content/uploads).
The second choice to make is whether uploaded files will be organised into sub-folders according to year and month. This makes sense if Read the rest of this entry »
Today I copied the page listing my activities from the current site to this blog. It was quite easy. I first opened the activities page in my browser, selected all text and pressed Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Then I logged into my blog, went into the Write > Page administration sub-panel, typed in ‘Activities’ as title and pasted the text into the visual editor. Voilá, due to the behind the scenes magic of copying and pasting the page’s HTML code into the editor, all headings and links were preserved! No further typing or editing necessary; I just published the page and it was done.
However, there were two minor issues. Read the rest of this entry »
To do anything on your blog, from writing posts to removing spam comments, from changing the look to reorganizing the sidebar, you have to log in, by clicking on the ‘Log in’ link under the ‘Meta’ heading on the right sidebar. Type in the username and password chosen during the installation process, and you’ll get into the main administration panel, the so called Dashboard, the entry page of your blog’s control centre. And from there… well, you can do anything. The WordPress documentation (aka the Codex) includes a tutorial to guide your first steps, full of hyperlinks to more detailed instructions. The tutorial even includes advice on how to plan your blog. The only downside: the tutorial is slightly outdated regarding some minor details, like the menus’ names in the Dashboard. Read the rest of this entry »
The team behind WordPress boasts to have a simple five minute installation process, by which I guess they mean it takes 5 minutes alone to read and understand the instructions, never mind executing all the downloading and configuration steps…
Fortunately, there’s a way for the time from nada to a WordPress blog to be under a minute: Read the rest of this entry »
According to my own, admittedly unscientific and cursory, search on the internet, the main blogging systems seem to be Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com. All these are hosted systems, i.e. some company does the management for you: they pay for the servers and data storage, install, run and upgrade the blogging software, and back up your blog. You just provide the content and you may customise a bit the look and structure of your blog. While Blogger and WordPress.com are free services (the latter with some paid premium add-ons), TypePad requires a subscription.
The alternative is Read the rest of this entry »
For many years I had a static black-and-white website, like most academics. I edited the simple bare bones HTML files on my machine with Microsoft Frontpage and then uploaded them to a specific directory of some departmental server. This was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs, but it had some drawbacks: Read the rest of this entry »
After tinkering for a week with a test WordPress blog, I feel confident enough to start the real thing: a blog that will eventually become my site, taking over from the current one and expanding it. I will record everything I do in that process, not only to keep notes of software and sites I found useful and to remind myself of the decisions I took, but also to help anyone else starting out blogging with WordPress.
So, before beginning to narrate in ‘real time’ the construction of this site, I guess I should explain why I think I need a blog…