Ian Swenson .com

Blogging Software

When I was first creating this web site, I stuck steadfastly to my hand-coding bylaws. But I soon found out that it was not going to work for blogging. Blogging is too fluid and too quick to keep updating. It takes a lot of time to create tons of pages, link them, and continue to update and crosslink as you go. I was thinking that I’d maybe just use a database, but then I got to thinking about feeds (more on those later) and I finally broke down and tried Wordpress.

Wordpress does everything I could have wanted in a blogging platform. It’s relatively simple to use and only a little hard to initially set up.

The very big downside to Wordpress is that it’s hard to construct a test platform for it. A test platform, for those of you who don’t know, is a local (meaning: on your computer) way to see if everything is working and looking proper-like. Wordpress works locally, but is tough to set up.

That’s where I come in. You need to go download the following:

1. Wordpress — Unzip the folder wherever you want to work on your webpages on your computer. I use the equivalent of C:\Web Pages\IanSwenson.com\ . We’ll go over the installation of this once the rest is set up.
2. Apache Server — This is an .msi file, which runs like an executable. Feel free to use the default setting in the install; there’s nothing special here.
3. PHP — Also an .msi file. This is essentially an add-on to Apache which allows it to process .php files. Try to get the same version as your web host uses. Mine uses PHP4, so that’s what I use on my test platform locally.
4. MySQL — Yet another .msi. You should be able to accept all of the defaults again. However, I set mine up to run as a Windows Service that is manually started. Then I go to the Administrative Tools\Services to get it manually started whenever I use it (you can type services.msc in your Windows run prompt to access the services as well).
5. HeidiSQL — This is a GUI MySQL editor. It’s a lot easier to use than using all of the text commands in the MySQL command prompt.

On the next page I’ll help you installing them.