Gupta Said

Since this is my first post, I think I should write about my experience of starting a blog and document some of the hurdles I crossed. So bear with me on this one…here it goes!

When I decided that I wanted to have my own blog to speak to the world, I stumbled upon Asha Dornfest’s post on how to start blogging. It is a very well written post - although it is focused more on helping mothers to start blogging. Another blogger I found very interesting was Liz Strauss.

Darren’s article on Choosing a Blog Platform is very informative and I found it very useful in deciding which platform to use for my blogging experience.

Being a techie I wanted to savor the entire experience of blogging…in other words..I wanted to host my own blog. So, I decided to give Wordpress a shot. I think I made a good decision as in a very short time, I was able to solve the kinks and get my blog going. In fact, I was amazed by the amount of information that is available all over the Internet on how to solve or workaround the issues and make use of Wordpress as a blogging and CMS tool.

I started with downloading the latest version of PHP, MySQL and Wordpress and nothing worked! Yes - nothing worked. I checked the install instructions for each of the components and nope I had not missed anything. I uninstalled everything and started with the minimum recommended configurations for PHP and MySQL and lol…wordpress was alive!

However, since I was using PHP4 and MySQL5, I ran into the infamous “Error establishing a database connection” by wordpress. I could use the userid/pwd to get into MySQL5 command line client as well as the MySQL admin tool but wordpress was not able to do it.

Oh well..that took a lot of time but was easy one to solve.

 Other places I found useful in getting my blog up are:

50 Best Free Wordpress Themes Gallery - a nice collection of themes
Meta Tags in Wordpress - describes importance of meta tags and where to put them
Multiple Domains using one WP install (not WPMU) - I just could not digest that one had to install WP multiple times for each blog. I kept digging and the solution on this one works just fine and is easy enough for non-techies too! Now my entire family can have their individual blogs without creating excessive overhead for me to maintain their separate installations.
Can’t login, can’t reset password - not that I did not note the password…but something crooked about wordpress when you use it for multiple blogs. After installing a new blog using same database different tables and using same wordpress install, it gives the auto generated password but does not let you in with it.
Simple Random Header Images for Your Blog - a very useful design tip although I must admit that I have not yet tried it.
Rotating Header Images in PHP is also interesting…although very much a techie thing. Another one on my list to play with…not there yet.

Hardening Wordpress - this is a MUST READ! It talks about security and even though the articlet says it is not complete…I think it guides you pretty well into what you should be securing especially if you are hosting on your own.

And finally…Alex King’s Wordpress Plugins - very useful. I am using his ShareThis plugin which is now owned by ShareThis.

I hope you will find the information above useful. I would like to hear from you on your blogging experience and you are welcome to share the tools you have used.