blog shift!!

For the past few years I’ve been blogging ocasionally at http://msanjay.htmlplanet.com/blog
though rather painfully creating HTML page manually and uploading it.

Nowadays I blog a little more frequently and the inconvenience prompted me to google for a personal blogging software solution.

All these years I’ve been a primarily Microsoft technologies chap. Recently while hunting for (preferably .NET) blogging solution, my friend (Hari Prasad Nadig) suggested wordpress. I felt quite intimidated about installing all the non-Microsoft dependencies like PHP and Apache and MySql etc. Still when I found there was just one single installable, I took the plunge. I realised what an idiotic frog in the well I had been all the while… fell madly in love with WordPress, and looked for a hosting environment.

Too enlightened to care 😉 …I even took the risk of answering somebody’s question in a Support forum… someone was seeing a lot of PHP instead of the UI.

I had exactly the same problem.

I had edited the wp_config.php to set the following values:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’);
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”);
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

Also I noticed that I had tried to open the file directly from Windows Explorer. i.e. my browser Address bar had file:// in it.

So I copied the wordpress folder to the PHP web root directory:

D:\phpdev\www

(one of the install steps was to upload the files)

Then I opened http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

This might not have been necessary, but I also created a “wordpress” database manually using the MySQL admin:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

and everything went magically from there. Very VERY impressive!! Totally floored with everything! 🙂

I later also figured out the import and export feature of MySQL – its just amazing to see a full fledged free, open-source relational database having such an intutive web – based UI, and such powerful features!

[heh heh btw someone had written to me…
@msanjay75. Repentant sinners are particularly welcome in the open source community. Many of us run our lifes very happily with scarcely an MS application at all. 🙂 ]

Still experimenting with wordpress – the real beauty is that all entries actually live in a database (also open source – MySql) – complete seperation of data and presentation!