WordPress Guide

Why you should switch to WordPress.org here.

Which plu­g­ins you have to check out once you do have a self hosted Word­Press blog here.

How to use Word­Press.. to come.

How to set every­thing up… HERE:

So after writ­ing about how awe­some Word­Press is, here comes the guide. If it helped you, con­sider shar­ing it on Face­book, Twit­ter and your blog. Or maybe donate a Dol­lar to me via Ama­zon: There are books I want that don’t cost more than that!

If you don’t want to do all of this your­self, because you don’t have the time or are afraid to mess some­thing up, write me and I’ll do it for you (you’d need to give me your data then, though.)

Step One:

Find a host. If you are from Ger­many I rec­om­mend syspro­vide (my Host) and all-inkl.com (Crini and Me’s Host). If you are from the United States or any other coun­try, Blue­Host, DreamHost, etc. seem to be very pop­u­lar! Prices start at 5 bucks.

There are free hosts, too, although obvi­ously the ser­vice is prob­a­bly not as high as with the GOOD com­mer­cial hosts: ingenyes.com and bubble.nu are two good exam­ples. In Ger­many we have some free hosts, but most are sucky. I tried 4 or 5 of them before I decided to use sysprovide.

As for the require­ments, Word­Press says it all:

• PHP ver­sion 5.2.4 or greater
• MySQL ver­sion 5.0 or greater

The require­ments have changed as of Word­Press 3.2. The min­i­mum require­ments for Word­Press 3.1 are PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.1.2.

If you want to know if your poten­tial host has this, Word­Press wrote your let­ter already. Just send it to them:

I’m inter­ested in run­ning the open-source Word­Press <http://wordpress.org/> blog­ging soft­ware and I was won­der­ing if my account sup­ported the following:

• PHP 5.2.4 or greater
• MySQL 5.0 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

Thanks!

Now with most hosts in Ger­many you will already have your own domain (I have two!) if not, buy one. This shouldn’t be too expen­sive. If I wanted to buy another one I’d have to pay 5.50 EUR, I think.

You can buy domains here:

• GoDaddy: Buy a domain end­ing with .info for one year and pay 1,49 EUR, buy one end­ing with .org for 5,15 EUR. Or buy one with .com for 5 years and pay just one buck more than you’d have to pay if you bought it for one year: 8,46 EUR.
• NameCheap: Also a host, prices are a lit­tle higher than GoDaddy’s, I think.

If you already have one, you have to dis­con­nect your old blog from it, so that it’ll work with your new blog.

Step Two:

If you’ve done all of that, it’s about Word­Press now. Depend­ing on your host you’ll have to either do the Word­Press instal­la­tion your­self or maybe your host will do it with the one click instal­la­tion. I had the option but did the instal­la­tion myself anyway.

If you do the one click thing, ignore the fol­low­ing stuff and scroll down.

• Down­load WordPress
• Down­load FileZilla, and Notepad++
• Open your webhost’s panel: Cre­ate a MySQL data­base, write down it’s name, your user­name and password
• Unzip your Word­Press folder and open it.
• Open the config-sample.php file
• Edit the fol­low­ing part:

 // ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); 

Done? Kay, then:

• Save this file as wp-config.php with­out the ‘sample’
• Open your Filezilla, log in (you got your FTP Server, User­name and Pass­word via mail)
• Copy your whole “word­press” folder into the “html” folder (now you have it in a subdirectory!)
• OR Copy the CONTENT of the word­press folder into the html folder (root direc­tory, yay!)

Step Three

• Open your domain in Mozilla or Chrome or the Inter­net Browser of your choise. (As long as it’s not IE. If it is, go away from my blog now, sir!)
• Does this image appear?

• Fill it out, and you are done.
• If not, open yourdomain.com/wordpress
• To later change this so that every­one will find your blog under yourdomain.com, open Set­tings › Gen­eral and then change the Site Address. So that your Word­Press address will be: yourdomain.com/wordpress and your Site Adress will be yourdomain.com : )
• If it still does not work, leave a com­ment or read WordPress’s guide here.

Step Four

• Now you need to ex– and import your old blog. This is eas­ily done:
• Read here how it’s done if you had a Blogspot/Blogger blog.
• Read here how it’s done if you had a Word­Press blog.
• Read here about it if you’re from Livejournal.
• Read here about all the other plat­forms, includ­ing tumb1r and Twitter (!)
• Import­ing the whole thing is even easier!

Impor­tant: If the file is larger than 2MBs there might be prob­lems, so try to i.e. export sev­eral files: One with posts filed under the cat­e­gory “1 Star Rat­ing”, the next for the 2 star reviews, etc. OR use a file split­ter! (Evan­ge­line might help you with that part!) OR – and this is what I would prob­a­bly do – over­ride the default limit in the htac­cess file you have in your root direc­tory. There are sev­eral expla­na­tions as to how it is done here, here, here, and here. *

Done? Your blog con­tent will now be dis­played on your blog!

Things you’ll want to do before you tell every­one about your new blog, though:

Step Five

Cat­e­gories and Tags. Think about how you’ll want to use them. If you want to add tax­onomies, write me and I’ll send you a tax­on­omy plu­gin. (I wrote a tuto­r­ial, should I pub­lish it? oô) Then set them up! It’s important!

Plu­g­ins. First thing, install the ones you really need, for exam­ple the ones I’ve men­tioned here. Don’t for­get a cool Captcha plugin!

Theme. It’s easy to cus­tomize a theme, but first chose one. There are so many cool free themes, so I’d pick one of those. If you want to change your font, back­ground color etc. either open your style.css (Dash­board › Appear­ance › Edi­tor) and edit it. If you don’t know what to change, ask some­one (i.e. me muaha!) to help you. Word­Press is cool and we love to help eachother!

Side­bars. You’ll want to add a Search, your Archive and Cat­e­gories. Maybe also a lit­tle About. What else? Your Net­worked Blogs and Bloglovin wid­get, your Goodreads wid­get, your Twit­ter feed? There are many things. Remem­ber that almost EVERYONE who answered the Blog Sur­vey said they don’t like sounds and too many (more than 3) but­tons in sidebars!

Pages. With Word­Press you can add as many pages as you want to and you should make use of that! Things that seem to be pop­u­lar: About, Review Pol­icy, Pol­icy (it’s ille­gal to NOT have one, did you know that?), Review Archive (sorted by author or title, not date! Most peo­ple don’t give a f-ck about WHEN you reviewed the book, they get that when they use the Word­Press Archive!), Library Archive (like.. ALL the books you read), Cred­its (If you use pic­tures from other web­sites, or music, or well any­thing.. If you were inspired by some­thing another blog­ger used, write it down HERE. You can get sued for NOT doing it, it’s a nice ges­ture and other peo­ple might be curi­ous to know anyway!)

Update Blog Ser­vices, let the world know!

Update Goodreads, Net­Gal­ley, Net­worked Blogs, Ama­zon, Library­Thing, Shel­fari, Bloglovin, Twit­ter, Face­book, and most impor­tantly your Feedburner!

Write about it. Impor­tant! Write about it, so that your old fol­low­ers will know!

Make them bitches want to fol­low you again! ; ) And yeah, I know that you know what I mean. A Give­away does the trick. Or two.

What’s left to do? Tell the world how awe­some Word­Press is so that GFC will die.

*Links to come